Situation Assessment And The Regulation Mechanism Of Unconventional Emergencies

The process of human development is always accompanied by a number of risks, all types of emergencies occur frequently, and the destructive power of emergencies is increasing. Also, due to the correlation, dependency, and coupling between different social subsystems, a partial or routine emergency more likely to become a highly destructive unconventional emergency. In recent years, China suffered a series of large-scale emergencies. It not only caused heavy casualties, but also leaded to serious economic losses which are about 3.5% of GDP. Over the same time, those unconventional emergencies posed some serious threat to social stability and sustainable development of economic. Improving the government's response ability to unconventional emergency contributes to increase the governance ability, and helps to enhance government's social administration capacity, and it is also the requirements of building a service-oriented government. Strengthen the research on management theory of unconventional emergencies, is not only China's needs, but also the whole world.Situation evolution of unconventional emergency and the related regulation mechanism is the main research object of this paper. The research topics including the trend evolution mechanism, path, pattern, and mechanism of emergency, the decision-making patterns of individual behavior, the decision-making patterns of group behavior and government information control strategies under the state of public emergency, the diffusion pattern and assessment methold of emergency impacts, the assessment models and countermeasures of regional emergency response capacity and public resilience.The situation evolution of emergencies is a complex dynamic system, affected by the property of the event itself, emergency response decision-making, the resilience of the bearing region, and the publici resilience. Based on the situation management theory, a three-dimensional analysis framework was put forwarded, consisting of capacity to bear, capacity to destroy, and capacity to control, which divided the situation evolution path into internal forces driving and hybrid forces driving, and the mechanisms of the situation evolution based on the differences of the paths are also studied. Using the theory of social physics, this paper builds a mathematical model of situation evolution and situation control, and studies the three main kinds of control including forward control, Synchronization control and backward control, of which the forward control is the optimal strategy.Individuals often make decisions according to intuition and experience in crisis situation. Because of intuitive bias, these decisions often lead to irrational behaviors of individuals and even non-rational behaviors of groups. The present paper analysis individuals' and groups' behavioral decision-making under emergency situation based on Prospect Theory and constructed a framework of government's information suplying mechanism with three dimensions such as risk attitude, risk perception and trust, we considered that the government can reduce the group behavioral space (GBS) through the effective crisis communication and it can reduce the uncertainty of emergency response. And we verified the validity of the framework through two typical cases such as SARS incident and Wenchuan earthquake. At the same time, people have their preference in deciding how to obtain information, and their favors are obviously related with their personal characteristics.The impact of unconventional emergencies is a function of emergency situation; the diffusion of emergencies is a nonlinear process from the physical impacts to the social impacts in which information dissemination and social amplification of risks have a significant role. According to the time-series characteristics and evolution characteristics, the diffusion of emergencies has three models which are peak-bottom type, burst type and ease type. There is a characterization Parameter n in the diffusion function which is representation of the properties of emergency events. We found that n=2 is the threshold of peak-bottom type to burst type, and n=5 is the threshold of burst type to ease type.There is a widely acknowledged need for a single composite index that provides a comprehensive picture of the impact of unconventional emergencies. A composite index combines and logically organizes important information policy-makers need to allocate resources for the recovery from unconventional emergencies; it can also inform hazard mitigation strategies. A capabilities-based approach was first developed by philosopher Martha Nussbaum and economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for this work and its application to development economics and policy.The capabilities framework is currently used by the United Nations and development agencies to estimate societal development through the Human Development Index (HDI). In this paper, we propose to measure the net impact of unconventional emergencies which is called "Emenrgency Impact Index (EII)"by looking at the impact of an emergency on the capabilities of individuals, and so, on their standard of living and well being. A few selected capabilities such as number of individuals killed, number of individuals injured, number of individuals left homeless and direct economic losses/GDP, can be used to assess the expected change in the quality of life of individuals in the society in the aftermath of an unconventional emergency.Scientific assessment of the regional emergency response capacity and enhance regional resilience are important paths to improve the social management capacity of government. This paper constructed an evaluation model of regional resilience based on the DEA theory, and measured each province's "regional resilience index" of mainland China from 2001 to 2009 through empirical analysis. The study found that economic growth alone can not bring optimization of regional resilience, more importantly, transformation of the mode of economic development, readjust the economic structure, strengthen scientific and technological innovation, focus on the rational use of ecological resources and the protection of environment have positive externalities to enhancing regional resilience. The present paper also analyzes the public vulnerability and establishes an evaluation model for public resilience; and makes an empirical research through a questionnaire survey in East China, we found that the public vulnerability is very high and the public resilience is quite low. On this basis we put forward some countermeasures and proposals for building public emergency capacity.