Flood disasters often have serious impacts on cities. Disaster prevention and mitigation schemes for flood disasters must be based on risk assessment. We constructed an indicator system for flood disaster risk assessment from the aspects of hazard factors, sensitivity to the environment, disaster vulnerability, flood disaster prevention, and resilience. Then we add the precipitation factor as a scenario parameter to the assessment of flood disasters, in order to assess the flood disaster risk under annual average precipitation scenarios, multi-year flood season average precipitation scenarios, and large typhoon precipitation scenarios. Xiamen is one of the cities with more serious flood disasters. We select Xiamen as an example and refer to existing indicators of flood disaster assessment. The results show that: (1) the coefficient of variation of flood disasters in Xiamen under the impact of large-scale typhoon precipitation is large; (2) the drainage and flood control capacity of Xiamen is generally insufficient, and the risk in the old city is high; (3) there are many flood-prone locations in Xiamen. Underpass interchanges, underground spaces, and urban villages have become the new key areas for flood control; and (4) the flood risk in the northern mountainous areas of Xiamen is the highest. Based on the assessment results, we further delineate the urban flood control zones and propose corresponding countermeasures. The study expands the research on flood disaster risk assessment, and also provides reference for relevant cities to deal with flood disasters.

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Efficient risk communication is a vital way to reduce the vulnerability of individuals when facing emergency risks, especially regarding earthquakes. Efficient risk communication aims at improving the supply of risk information and fulfilling the need for risk information by individuals. Therefore, an investigation into individual-level information seeking behavior within earthquake risk contexts is very important for improved earthquake risk communication. However, at present there are very few studies that have explored the behavior of individuals seeking earthquake risk information. Under the guidance of the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model as well as relevant practical findings using the structural equation model, this study attempts to explore the main determinants of an individual’s earthquake risk information seeking behavior, and to validate the mediator effect of information need during the seeking process. A questionnaire-based survey of 918 valid respondents in Songyuan, China, who had been hit by a small earthquake swarm, was used to provide practical evidence for this study. Results indicated that information need played a noteworthy role in the earthquake risk information seeking process, and was detected both as an immediate predictor and as a mediator. Informational subjective norms drive the seeking behavior on earthquake risk information through both direct and indirect approaches. Perceived information gathering capacity, negative affective responses and risk perception have an indirect effect on earthquake risk information seeking behavior via information need. The implications for theory and practice regarding risk communication are discussed and concluded.

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