Resilience to EArthquake-induced landslide risk in CHina (REACH)

The ability for communities to "bounce back" from major disasters is essential for poverty alleviation and economic development. Termed "disaster resilience", this process is of particular importance in China as rapid economic expansion and urbanization has increased Chinese susceptibility to a number of major disasters, including the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. Earthquake-induced landslides represent a particular challenge to resilience as increased rates of landslide hazard may persist for many decades. The proposed research seeks to understand what controls this persistent landslide hazard and the processes that cause landslides to jeopardise recovery. To understand the recovery process and how it affects resilience, we will investigate the role of "social vulnerability" in modifying the response to earthquakes and their related hazards. We will assess the underlying drivers of social vulnerability and the spatio-temporal differences across Sichuan province. We will combine our estimates of landslide hazard and social vulnerability across the decade after the Wenchuan Earthquake, investigating both the spatial patterns of risk and how these change with time. To achieve these goals, we will focus our work on the areas affected by the Wenchuan Earthquake, where the Chengdu Institute of Technology-State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection has created an incredibly large dataset of landslide hazards since the earthquake. In collaboration with landslide scientists and social scientists at Cardiff University's Sustainable Places Research Institute, we will expand this dataset in two ways; (1) increasing the resolution of landslide hazard mapping to understand the relative role of aftershocks and rainfall in controlling hazard, and (2) using local census data to understand social vulnerability and how the interaction between social vulnerability and landslide hazards has changed in space and through time. The unprecedented detail of our data will enable us to develop a new probabilistic landslide hazard model that incorporates landslides caused by both aftershocks and rainfall events that can be applied across earthquake-prone China and perhaps even globally. Field data collected as part of this effort will help to constrain threshold values and so help support the construction of a landslide early warning system for Sichan. Finally, we will model the resilience of the built environment and key infrastructure through state of the art machine learning algorithms. As evidence of our commitment to improve the welfare of earthquake-prone China through better planning for disasters we will engage with an extensive network of governmental and non-governmental institutions. From the first day of the grant we will engage with organisations with interests in both science and policy to achieve this goal. We will also model resilience under different demographic and policy scenarios, using this as a tool to understand and communicate the challenges of building resilient communities.

The generation of credible, salient, and effective policy-relevant science requires the continual, two-way, multi-scale engagement with a range of governmental and non-governmental actors throughout and beyond the research process. To implement this strategy, this project has a full work package dedicated to navigating the science-policy-impact nexus. This draws on two core concepts for balancing the tensions and common interests of scientists and policy makers, who may have different epistemological or methodological perspectives, but share common goals (e.g. improving disaster resilience):
(1) Through a dedicated research impact professional, we will engage with boundary organisations, such as the World Bank, which sit at the frontier of science and politics. This will involve a medium to long-term processes of trust building, through developing and improving links between agencies, communities, policy makers, urban planners, NGOs, and scientists to build and secure long-term improvements in disaster resilience.
(2) We will develop boundary objects, in the form of collaboratively developed tools for analysing the evolution of the earthquake risk profile across seismically active regions of Sichuan province under various scenarios. These tools will retain a degree of plasticity that allows them to be moulded or re-interpreted to fit the needs, interests, or perspectives of diverse actors and social groups.

Through this approach, our work will benefit those living in seismically-active mountain regions of China and elsewhere, by assisting the work of key stakeholders responsible for disaster resilience planning. These range from local government departments in our study area, such has the Sichuan Provincial Land and Resources, Transportation, Construction, and Planning Departments, to bodies responsible for national planning and disaster response, such as the China Geological Survey, Ministry of Land and Resources and National Commission for Disaster Reduction. In collaboration with the World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and BRE, the research will contribute to development planning and investment decisions at the international level. The better spatial-temporal understanding of post-earthquake risk that this research will develop, delivered to these groups through active engagement to disseminate and implement that knowledge, will facilitate evidence-based policy decisions within and beyond the timescale of the project. This is supported by delivery of the project outputs to Chinese, UK and international public audiences through broadcast media.

Through an open-data web application and API, we will make the distilled outputs of our research (multi-temporal hazard and risk maps) available in a format that can be practically utilised by other researchers and non-specialists (see below). The benefits of our research will thereby be made readily available to the risk research community and its extensions into the catastrophe modelling, insurance and engineering industries. This will allow research outputs to be readily incorporated into future risk modelling and engineering activities addressing, for example, natural catastrophe supply chain risk in China, which has been identified as a significant concern among large multi-national corporations. As the largest global hub for catastrophe risk underwriting, the indirect benefits of this research may be particularly pertinent to the UK's London insurance market, where research and professional skills developed by staff working on the project will also be strongly applicable.

This all contributes to a more secure quality of life for those living with earthquake risk, particularly in mountainous regions surrounding the Pacific Rim, Himalayan Syntaxis and Anatolian fault zone, by helping communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from future earthquake impacts.