An integrated risk assessment framework for multiple natural disasters based on multi-dimensional correlation analysis

Natural disaster risk assessment is of great significance to increasingly severe disaster prevention and mitigation work. However, the method of risk assessment for multi-disaster is still a difficult problem. In this paper, a novel multi-disaster risk assessment framework based on multi-dimensional correlation analysis is proposed, which combines numerical correlation, geographic correlation and multi-disaster correlation, from a more comprehensive point of view to give a reasonable multi-disaster risk assessment. Firstly, in the perspective of numerical correlation, gray correlation method is used to quantify and rank impact factors system data of natural disasters. Then, the factor detection module of geographic detector is used to detect the driving force of factors, which distributes the weights, based on the geographic correlation view. Finally, combining with above results, a multi-disaster coupling risk assessment model (MRAM) is established, which focus on multi-disaster correlation, to assess the integrated multi-disaster risk. The multi-disaster risk assessment framework is applied to evaluate the integrated risk of multiple natural disasters like flood, earthquake and storm surge in Tianjin City, China. The integrated risk is compared with the history natural disasters intensity and the risk results obtained by TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution), which shows that the MRAM proposed is more reasonable to reflect the risk distribution. Furthermore, the framework is expected to be extended to multi-disaster risk assessment in other areas and contribute to building good disaster prevention and mitigation system.