Resources Science ›› 2018, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (2): 452-.doi: 10.18402/resci.2018.02.20

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles    

Assessment of vulnerability in natural-social system in Hexi, Gansu

Sue ZHOU(), Mingjun ZHANG(), Shengjie WANG, Meiping SUN   

  1. Geography and Environment College, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China
  • Received:2017-05-16 Revised:2017-12-20 Online:2018-02-20 Published:2018-02-11

Abstract:

Vulnerability is important content and a hot issue in the study of global environmental change and regional sustainable development. Based on vulnerability assessment modeling, contribution of factors modeling and the entropy-right method, we constructed an evaluation system for vulnerability in a natural-social system. Exposure, sensibility, adaptive capacity and vulnerability of each village and town in Hexi area were analyzed. The contribution of each index and feature factors were also analyzed. We found that medium, higher and high vulnerability areas occupied 70.85% of the whole area in Hexi. The vulnerability degree was high and the vulnerability of southern mountain areas was higher than northern areas at lower altitudes. From the perspective of three continental river basins, the highest level of vulnerability appeared in Shule River Basin, and the vulnerability of the Black River Basin took second place, and that of the Shiyang River Basin was the lowest. Regions considering the adaptive capacity degree of natural system, sensibility degree of the social-economic system, sensibility degree of natural system and exposure degree of natural system as the main contribution factor occupied 91.77%, 87.23%, 67.85% and 56.53% of the whole area in Hexi, so reduced the adaptive capacity degree of the natural system, the sensibility degree of the natural system, the sensibility degree of the social-economic system and the exposure degree of the natural system is the key to reducing vulnerability in Hexi. Only by doing this can we improve our living environment.

Key words: vulnerability assessment, natural-social system, scale of villages and towns, main contribution factor, Hexi area