Exploring the characteristics of major natural disasters in China and their impacts during the past decades

The exploration of the characteristics of natural disasters (NDs) and their impacts have important implications for guiding disaster prevention and mitigation. This paper discussed the characteristics of the major NDs that occurred in mainland China between 1980 and 2011 based on the number of disasters and fatalities, the affected population, and the resulting economic damages. We further examined the relationships between the level of social/economic development and the disaster losses. At last, we also explored the trend variations in disaster losses and losses expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (losses/GDP) for 31 provinces in China over the period from 1990 to 2011. The results show that over the past three decades, the number of major NDs and the number of affected population appear to exhibit a detectable increasing trend, while the direct economic losses and the deaths show a slight increase trend. The correlations between the number of disasters and the economic losses as well as deaths and between the economic losses and socioeconomic status were not significant (p > 0.05), which indicates that the growth in the number of disasters do not result in a significant increase in the disaster losses. Further investigations demonstrate that as economies develop, there are fewer losses/GDP in China over the past two decades. The per capita accumulative losses and losses/GDP in the western and central regions were higher than that in the eastern parts of China. There are significant regional differences in the trends in disaster losses and losses/GDP in China. Statistics also indicate that more than 70 % provinces in underdeveloped regions show an increasing trend in disaster losses, whereas exceeding 90 % provinces exhibit a decreasing trend in their losses/GDP. These results suggest that the economic development may have played an important role in improving the capacity of disaster prevention and reduction.