The Vulnerability of People to Landslides: A Case Study on the Relationship between the Casualties and Volume of Landslides in China

Qigen Lin, Ying Wang, Tianxue Liu, Yingqi Zhu and Qi Sui
Additional contact information
Qigen Lin: Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Ying Wang: Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Tianxue Liu: Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Yingqi Zhu: Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Qi Sui: Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

IJERPH, 2017, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-12

Abstract: The lack of a detailed landslide inventory makes research on the vulnerability of people to landslides highly limited. In this paper, the authors collect information on the landslides that have caused casualties in China, and established the Landslides Casualties Inventory of China . 100 landslide cases from 2003 to 2012 were utilized to develop an empirical relationship between the volume of a landslide event and the casualties caused by the occurrence of the event. The error bars were used to describe the uncertainty of casualties resulting from landslides and to establish a threshold curve of casualties caused by landslides in China. The threshold curve was then applied to the landslide cases occurred in 2013 and 2014. The validation results show that the estimated casualties of the threshold curve were in good agreement with the real casualties with a small deviation. Therefore, the threshold curve can be used for estimating potential casualties and landslide vulnerability, which is meaningful for emergency rescue operations after landslides occurred and for risk assessment research.

Keywords: landslide; vulnerability; casualties; volume; uncertainty; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/2/212/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/2/212/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:14:y:2017:i:2:p:212-:d:91038

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().