Geographical Analysis of Community Resilience to Seismic Hazard in Southwest China

This article presents an explorative analysis of community resilience to seismic hazard in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake area of Southwest China. We used a regression model to analyze the impact of 13 key socioeconomic and demographic variables on community resilience in 105 counties, based on data derived from population census and provincial statistical yearbooks of China. In this research, we argue that community resilience should be measured by the change of population growth rate (Delta dp) instead of population growth rate (dp) when using socioeconomic data from a fast-growing country such as China. Using Delta dp as the dependent variable resulted in a better regression model. To avoid the common multicollinearity problems among the independent variables, a principal component-based factor analysis was used to consolidate the socioeconomic variables into four comprehensive factors. The geographically weighted regression coefficient maps revealed the spatial pattern of the association of the variables with resilience. We also used the K-means cluster method to segment the study area into four subregions that exhibit localized characteristics defined by the regression coefficients. In this way, we could infer location-sensitive disaster management policies that help to enhance social resilience to seismic hazards.