Researchers’ Work from Beijing Normal University Focuses on Risk Management (Development of an Asset Value Map for Disaster Risk Assessment In China By Spatial Disaggregation Using Ancillary Remote Sensing Data)

2019 FEB 22 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- New research on Risk Management is the subject of a report. According to news reporting originating in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “The extent of economic losses due to a natural hazard and disaster depends largely on the spatial distribution of asset values in relation to the hazard intensity distribution within the affected area. Given that statistical data on asset value are collected by administrative units in China, generating spatially explicit asset exposure maps remains a key challenge for rapid postdisaster economic loss assessment.”

Funders for this research include National Key Research and Development Program-Global Change and Mitigation Project: Global change risk of population and economic system: mechanism and assessment, National Natural Science Foundation of China, 111 Project “Hazard and Risk Science Base at Beijing Normal University.”

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from Beijing Normal University, “The goal of this study is to introduce a top-down (or downscaling) approach to disaggregate administrative-unit level asset value to grid-cell level. To do so, finding the highly correlated ‘surrogate’ indicators is the key. A combination of three data sets-nighttime light grid, LandScan population grid, and road density grid, is used as ancillary asset density distribution information for spatializing the asset value. As a result, a high spatial resolution asset value map of China for 2015 is generated. The spatial data set contains aggregated economic value at risk at 30 arc-second spatial resolution. Accuracy of the spatial disaggregation reflects redistribution errors introduced by the disaggregation process as well as errors from the original ancillary data sets. The overall accuracy of the results proves to be promising. The example of using the developed disaggregated asset value map in exposure assessment of watersheds demonstrates that the data set offers immense analytical flexibility for overlay analysis according to the hazard extent.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “This product will help current efforts to analyze spatial characteristics of exposure and to uncover the contributions of both physical and social drivers of natural hazard and disaster across space and time.”

For more information on this research see: Development of an Asset Value Map for Disaster Risk Assessment In China By Spatial Disaggregation Using Ancillary Remote Sensing Data. Risk Analysis, 2018;38(1):17-30. Risk Analysis can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; Risk Analysis - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1539-6924)

Our news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained by contacting J.D. Wu, Beijing Normal University, State Key Lab Earth Surface Proc & Resource Ecol, Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Additional authors for this research include N. Li, P.J. Shi and Y. Li.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12806. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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