The economy of China and the travel needs of its citizens depend significantly on the continuous and reliable services provided by its railway system. However, this system is subject to frequent natural hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, and debris flow. A mechanism to assess the railway system vulnerability under these hazards and the design of effective vulnerability mitigation strategies ...

Changes in ecological vulnerability were analyzed for Northern Shaanxi, China using a geographic information system (GIS). An evaluation model was developed using a spatial principal component analysis (SPCA) model containing land use, soil erosion, topography, climate, vegetation and social economy variables. Using this model, an ecological vulnerability index was computed for the research reg...

Recent reports and scholarship suggest that adapting to current climate variability may represent a ‘no regrets’ strategy for adapting to climate change. Addressing ‘adaptation deficits’ and other approaches that target existing vulnerabilities are helpful for responding to current climate variability, butwe argue that theymay not be sufficient for adapting to climate change. Through a reviewan...

The empirical analysis of the vulnerability of people to recent natural disasters is probably the best way to get an analytical handle on estimating the levels of human vulnerability that could result from the intensifying consequences of climate change in the future. This empirical approach is based on the underlying assumption that the vulnerability to past climate-related disasters, such as ...

In disaster studies, vulnerability is used to denote “the susceptibility or potential for harm to social, infrastructural, economic and ecological systems” (Pine, 2009, 136). As the nodes of critical systems of human artefacts, urban areas are vulnerable to natural hazards, and suffer losses from disasters. The vulnerability of urban areas is triggered by historical, social, political and physi...

This article introduced an assessment of the Moscow population vulnerability to natural and man-made hazards, taking into account actual size its movement within different time cycles (daily weekly-seasonal). The use alternative information sources, allowing obtain more detailed about state socio-geographical systems, correlates with modern international approaches corresponds global trends in ...