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Risk assessment of landslides along the Silk Road Economic Belt

Date: 2020-12-21      View counts: 2905    

Label:

Author
PEI Yan-qian,QIU Hai-jun,HU Sheng,YANG Dong-dong,CAO Ming-ming,ZOU Qiang
Journal
ARID LAND GEOGRAPHY
Class
Risk Assessment
Year
2018
Paper Keyword
landslide; safe zone;FAHP;risk assessment;the Silk Road Economic Belt
Abstract
The “Belt and Road” Initiative is an open and inclusive international economic cooperation network with an expanding spatial scope that covers Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania and other regions of the world. It involves more than half of the world’s population and creates a great economic aggregation of 21 × 1012 USD. However, countries on the “Belt and Road” located in the Mediterranean-Himalaya volcanic seismic belt and the volcanic seismic belt along the Pacific Rim suffer from strongest global movement and crustal activity. The natural environment in the region is very different considering the serious damage caused by landslide hazards. In addition, most of the countries and regions along the line are developing countries with weak abilities to resist disasters. Due to the serious threatens brought by frequent landslide disasters to the lives and property of local people, which does a great harm on restricting local social and economic development. Therefore, how to scientifically establish the disaster prevention and mitigation mechanism or system is a critical issue the region is facing that needs to be addressed. Based on this, taking the characteristics of landslide disaster, the distribution law and hazards inducing environment into ac- count, this paper combines the slope and topographic relief to extract the safety area of the study. Based on the safe- ty area, the FAHP is used to confirm the risk assessment model of the landslide risk and to calculate the comprehensive weight of each factor. The risk of landslide in the countries along “the Belt and Road” is quantitatively evaluated and the relevant data is verified. The results are expected to provide a scientific reference for the prevention and control of landslide disasters in countries and regions along the “Belt and Road”. Firstly, the safety area is mainly located in the plain,basin and desert, etc. Only 4.7% ( 56) landslide fall within the safety area, which means the results are reasonable. Secondly, the conditions that are likely to induce landslides are: slopes between 25° and 45°, topographic relief more than 900 m, distance from the river less than 500 m, average annual rainfall between 400 mm and 800 mm, seismic density is 3 × 10-4-2 × 10-3 per km2, the engineering geology rock masses being medium hard rocks or soft rocks or soil mass. In the non-safe area, landslides are mainly at medium and low hazard levels ( 80.3% ), and the very high, high hazard areas are mainly distributed among plateau, mountainous land and hills, in which the topographic relief and the density of the earthquake are larger and rocks are softer. The AUC value of hazard is 0.823. Thirdly, the conditions when the landslides are likely to create potential damage include the population density of 80~160 person per km2, road density of 0.2~ 0.9 km per km2 and night light index of 20~60. In non-safe area, the potential damage of landslide disasters is generally lower. The high, very high damage areas are mainly distributed in China ( Southeastern Hilly Region, Taiwan, Southwest Mountain Area, Qinba Mountain and Lo- ess Plateau), north of Southeast Asia, South Asia, the northwest of West Asia, southwest of Europe and some countries in Africa where the population density is large, economic condition is well, and the highway facilities are well developed. The results of the damage assessment are consistent with the spatial distribution of economic loss and death toll caused by the landslide, Finally, in the non-safe area, the proportions are 44.7%, 25.5%, 15.3%, 10.3% and 4.2% respectively for the five risk zones, namely the extremely low risk zone, low risk zone, medium risk zone, high risk zone and extremely high risk zone. Therefore, it is dominated by the extremely low risk zone and low risk zone ( with a sum of 70.2% ). In summary, the results of risk classification of landslide disaster evaluated in this paper are scientific and reasonable, which can provide a scientific reference for the prevention and control of landslide disasters in countries and regions along the “Belt and Road”.
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