Household economic resilience to catastrophic rainstorms and flooding in a Chinese megacity

Abstract

Megacities situated on flood plains face escalating risks of waterlogging and inundation. Tianjin is one of these megacities in China where residents are exposed to these risks and not well prepared for their consequences. Government policies should support the most vulnerable and less resilient groups. This study can inform policy-making by identifying the socio-economic characteristics of those who are financially better prepared for the consequences of catastrophic rainstorms and flooding. A structured questionnaire survey was administered to 332 Tianjin residents. Results confirm that financial conditions crucially determine household resilience to these natural hazards. Lower-income and less educated urban residents have lower resilient capacity. Weak engagement in the community, including residential committees and other organisations, is related to lower capacity to cope with the economic consequences of extreme weather events. Less resilient groups are therefore those who are subject to urban poverty and have limited social capital. Tianjin and other cities in the developing world require resilience strategies that attend to this segment of urban population.

Integrating user‐generated content to track urban flooding hotspots and foster emergency management: A case study in central China

“…Floods can cause massive economic losses, deaths, and poverty, and even aggravate complex social and ecological issues (World Bank, 2010). According to statistics presented by the United Nations, the economic loss caused by global urban floods amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars (Kunapo, Chandra, & Peterson, 2009; Lo, Xu, Chan, & Su, 2016; World Meteorological Organization, 2008; Zhou, Leng, Su, & Ren, 2019). In the future climate change scenario, it has been predicted that flooding may increase in cities worldwide (Hallegatte, Green, Nicholls, & Corfee‐Morlot, 2013).…”

Understanding China’s Urban Rainstorm Waterlogging and Its Potential Governance

“…In the process of China's urbanization, due to the lack of foresight in urban planning, urban construction has destroyed the original natural geographical landscape pattern on a large scale, resulting in many unreasonable factors to expand urban rainstorm waterlogging [7,27]. China's urbanization construction constantly erodes the limited space of absorbing rainstorm in cities, which makes it difficult for cities to absorb a large amount of rainwater resources in a short-time in case of rainstorms [35]. Rainstorms often affect the normal operation of the whole city through the weak links in the city [27].…”

“…The city scale is expanding continuously, impervious surface layers are greatly increasing, urban forest land and garden land are reduced, and the urban rivers and lakes are shrinking, which greatly reduces the storage space of urban rainstorm waterlogging (Figure 2) [17]. For example, the continuous development of urban construction from the inner ring to the outer ring in Beijing has not only changed the original water system, but also affected the existing urban water system pattern; thus, affecting its flood control and drainage function [35]. There were 127 lakes in Wuhan city in 1949.…”

“…Although most of the key flood control areas in China have prepared flood risk maps, which have not been released to the public, and legislation lags behind, the flood risk maps do not have legal status and are not binding. The users of flood risk maps are limited to flood control command agencies (their application scopes and fields are very limited) [34,35,37].…”

“…Considering the background of severe rainstorm waterlogging, how to better understand the natural and human causes of rainstorm waterlogging in China is not only the focus of academic circles [32][33][34][35][36][37], but also the basic work of the government (i.e., to carry out rainstorm waterlogging control). It is also one of the important aspects of this paper.…”