Risk Assessment and Prediction of Air Pollution Disasters in Four Chinese Regions

Abstract

Evaluating the regional trends of air pollution disaster risk in areas of heavy industry and economically developed cities is vital for regional sustainable development. Until now, previous studies have mainly adopted a traditional weighted comprehensive evaluation method to analyze the air pollution disaster risk. This research has integrated principal component analysis (PCA), a genetic algorithm (GA) and a backpropagation (BP) neural network to evaluate the regional disaster risk. Hazard risk, hazard-laden environment sensitivity, hazard-bearing body vulnerability and disaster resilience were used to measure the degree of disaster risk. The main findings were: (1) the air pollution disaster risk index of Liaoning Province, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province increased year by year from 2010 to 2019; (2) the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of each regional air pollution disaster risk index in 2019, as predicted by the PCA-GA-BP neural network, were 0.607, 0.317 and 20.3%, respectively; (3) the predicted results were more accurate than those using a PCA-BP neural network, GA-BP neural network, traditional BP neural network, support vector regression (SVR) or extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), which verified that machine learning could be used as a method of air pollution disaster risk assessment to a considerable extent.

Vulnerability to Poverty in Chinese Households with Elderly Members: 2013–2018

“…It is interesting to discover that routine physical examination is the primary determinant for household vulnerability to poverty in both urban and rural areas. Even in urban areas, more than 50% of households do not take a physical check-up on time, and empirical studies revealed that the early stages of several critical illness such as Hepaticsclerosis and cardiovascular disease are detected upon physical examination [80][81][82]. The deprivation of routine physical health examinations gives elders the risk of their minor ailments changing to major diseases, which can also offer a reasonable explanation as to why bad health is a key determinant that pushes both urban and rural households into poverty.…”

Air Pollution Engineering for Accidents With Hazardous Substances

“…Anthropogenic disasters can be initiated by careless treatment of the working environment or poor organization of work or be purposefully carried out in the case of terrorist acts and civil conflicts with the aim of causing significant physical damage, loss of life or impact on the environment. Risk assessment [23] and optimum risk management is usually sought to reduce the consequences of such disasters. Risk assessment includes (1) hazard identification; (2) exposure assessment; (3) dose-response assessment and (4) risk characterization.…”