Analysis of social vulnerability to natural disasters in China

Despite of a recent increase in the number of vulnerability analysis, there has been relatively little discussion on vulnerability assessment of social system. The objective of this paper is to undertake a comprehensive systematic analysis of the social vulnerability hit by natural disasters as well as its application in China. Fourteen unique variations of the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) were calculated for each study area and evaluated by factor analysis, and overall social vulnerability was calculated by applying principal components analysis (PCA), and then made use of GIS to get the spatial patterning of social vulnerability. The paper concludes that it is possible to construct an effective index of vulnerability, and our results can be also taken as an important way to recognize social characteristics of natural disasters.