Research On Social Vulnerability To Flood Hazards At The Rural Household Level

Flood disaster, one of the most frequently happened disasters, affects a wide range area and brings great harm to human’s survival and development. Flood disaster vulnerability has been an important aspect of flood disaster research fields, becoming a broad consensus in academic circles. Rural household is the basic unit of agricultural production and main vulnerable group when responding to flood disaster. Paying attention to the study on rural households’ flood vulnerability is helpful to evaluate the flood risk logically, so that countermeasures against flood disaster are put forward fruitfully.Based on the summary of related concepts, methods, theories,analysis,factors and basic characteristics of flood social vulnerability, combined with the latest research all over the word, flood disaster evaluation index system and model were established according to the entropy method. Taking advantage of basis data from questionnaires and the interviews, the research on ordinary rural household’s flood social vulnerability was made by using multivariate statistical methods, thus proposing the mitigation measures This study is beneficial for the mountainous areas of western Henan suit to carry out disaster reduction practice in accordance with local conditions. Meanwhile,the research on the vulnerability of rural household’s flood disaster also provides certain reference for other areas. Main conclusions are summarized as follows:(1) As a whole, the flood social vulnerability in Luanchuan County is high.whose primary factor is the perception ability of rural household, the second factor is the intensity of flood disaster; the following factor is the protection of the government,and the final factor is the rural households’ social economic elements and agricultural production elements, the constitute characteristics and the level of education elements have smaller effects.(2)When affected by flood disaster, a large proportion of rural households prefer to responding in dealing stage and post-disaster stage. Besides, rural households who are able to take pre-disaster prevention are seldom. Most rural households ignore the importance of pre-disaster prevention. Moreover, the disaster perception ability andskills dealing with disaster prevention and reduction are poor, whose knowledge and skills of controlling or reducing flood disaster have not been fully applied in the actual disaster reduction.(3)The rural households’ flood social vulnerability distribution has a significant difference, that is, the region with higher vulnerability is basically consistent with the river flow, and the villages near river haves higher vulnerability than the villages which are far away from river.(4) From the perspective of economic development level and education development level, differences in above two aspects lead to the disparate between sensitivity and coping capability of each village. Less developed economic and high vulnerability are are mutually causalities. Meanwhile, the flood disaster vulnerability degree of some areas, which possess more agricultural population, cultivated land area and the higher agricultural income, are higher. While the unit area of higher GDP,higher per capital net income of farmers and income diversification, the flood disaster vulnerability of rural household is relatively low.