Exploring the Spatial Association of Local Vulnerability: A case study of flood-prone areas

Vulnerability is a key concept in global climate change, and geographic feature and social feature are major factors while measuring the vulnerability. The perception of disaster, inaccurate resource distribution and various... [ view full abstract ]

Vulnerability is a key concept in global climate change, and geographic feature and social feature are major factors while measuring the vulnerability. The perception of disaster, inaccurate resource distribution and various loading of environmental goods and bads, especially the excessive land use consumption result in unproportioned vulnerability and leave high vulnerability area facing adverse living environment. Many studies applied aggregated indices to connecting multiple factors to real events and comparing the different intensities across regions. Nevertheless, not only the integration and weighted rationality challenge current research but the disregard of potential spatial variation and disaster capacity might result in inaccurate explanation on local vulnerabilities. Therefore, this study discusses the following issues: (i) Due to various conditions (exposure, sensitivity and adaptive), is there any difference of vulnerability across spatial units? (ii) Due to the spatial variance of vulnerability, is there any different impact during the flood impacts? We utilize Geographically Weighted Principal Component Analysis to analyse the potential attributes and spatial features result in different vulnerability. The result of Spatial Autocorrelation Coefficients Analysis can help identify the hot-spots and cold-spots of potential impact category and adaptive capacity category which represent high degree of potential danger or differences with distribution of resources places while flooding. The results of Geographically Weighted Principal Component Analysis can provide information of different factors across areas. The results can apply to the discussion of disaster mitigation under global climate change.