Development and Application of Urban Landslide Vulnerability Assessment Methodology Reflecting Social and Economic Variables

Abstract

An urban landslide vulnerability assessment methodology is proposed with major focus on considering urban social and economic aspects. The proposed methodology was developed based on the landslide susceptibility maps that Korean Forest Service utilizes to identify landslide source areas. Frist, debris flows are propagated to urban areas from such source areas by Flow-R (flow path assessment of gravitational hazards at a regional scale), and then urban vulnerability is assessed by two categories: physical and socioeconomic aspect. The physical vulnerability is related to buildings that can be impacted by a landslide event. This study considered two popular building structure types, reinforced-concrete frame and nonreinforced-concrete frame, to assess the physical vulnerability. The socioeconomic vulnerability is considered a function of the resistant levels of the vulnerable people, trigger factor of secondary damage, and preparedness level of the local government. An index-based model is developed to evaluate the life and indirect damage under landslide as well as the resilience ability against disasters. To illustrate the validity of the proposed methodology, physical and socioeconomic vulnerability levels are analyzed for Seoul, Korea, using the suggested approach. The general trend found in this study indicates that the higher population density areas under a weaker fiscal condition that are located at the downstream of mountainous areas are more vulnerable than the areas in opposite conditions.

Human Vulnerability to Landslides

“…Many explanations have been proposed, including that children and the elderly are less physically able to escape from hazardous areas or resist the physical trauma of a violent landslide or that children have a lesser understanding of the hazard and fewer life experiences to draw on for rapid decision‐making (HR Wallingford, 2006; Zahran et al, 2008). Indicator‐based frameworks for landslide vulnerability have adopted these results, assigning greater vulnerability to the young and aged (Eidsvig et al, 2014; Li et al, 2010; Park et al, 2016; Uzielli et al, 2008).…”

Quantitative Assessment of Landslide Risk Based on Susceptibility Mapping Using Random Forest and GeoDetector

“…The vulnerability assessment model for landslides mainly considers the disasterbearing body. It refers to objects that suffer from landslide disasters, such as human beings, property, resources or the ecological environment [37]. Within the hazard range, evaluating the damage and the degree of damage that the hazard-bearing body may produce when suffering from a landslide disaster is known as vulnerability evaluation.…”

“…Evidence from various studies indicates that material, community, and economic factors need to be considered in vulnerability assessment [13,37,38]. Based on disaster-affected body data collection, remote sensing interpretation and field investigation, we selected four important factors in constructing the landslide vulnerability evaluation library.…”

The concept of social risk: A geographical approach

“…illiteracy rate/100 inhabitants, disabled persons, persons without acces to different basic services, average income per household, number of salaried persons, unemployment rate, number of hospitals, number of physicians/1,000 inhabitants), or indices developed within some scientific studies and projects, such as: Human Development Index (HDI -UNDP, 1993), Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI, 2003), Deprivation Index (Zamfir 2015), Social Vulnerability Index (SVI, 2016). In the recent years, many studies have focused on evaluating the vulnerability of population and of human settlements to specific hazard types: index of socio-economic vulnerability to drought (Dumitrașcu et al 2017), index of social vulnerability to floods (Oulahen et al 2015;Roder et al 2017), socio-economic vulnerability index to landslide (Park et al 2016), social vulnerability index to environmental hazards (Cutter et al 2003). For the adaptation capacity, the relevant indicators considered refer to access to education, to information and financial resources, social protection systems, sanitary services, the existence of economic alternatives, the infrastructure quality, technological development, etc.…”