A Geographical Perspective on the Scientific Foundations and Strategies for Disaster Prevention and Risk Governance

This paper elaborates on the scientific foundations of disaster prevention and risk governance from a geographical perspective. Disaster science requires a thorough understanding of the regional disaster system composed of hazards, the environment, and exposed units. The stability of the environment (geographical environment), hazardousness, and the vulnerability of exposed units jointly determine how disasters occur, the extent of affected areas, and the magnitude of disaster impacts. The indispensable role of the environment in disaster formation should be fully recognized: a hazard is a necessary condition for disaster formation, exposed units constitute a sufficient condition, and the environment can amplify or mitigate hazard intensity and the severity of disaster impacts. Regional disaster prevention and risk governance require a deep understanding of the complexity of the mechanisms, processes, and dynamics of hazard and disaster formation. Particular attention should be paid to multi-hazards, disaster chains (cascading disasters), and disaster compounds (compound events), which can amplify hazard intensity, expand affected areas, and aggravate disaster impacts. Disaster prevention and risk governance should enhance consilience, strengthen the synergistic effects arising from its formation, and improve the interrelated mechanisms of consensus, coexistence, symbiosis, and win-win outcomes on which consilience depends. This paper advocates building a “Resilient China” and developing a new integrated model that combines the “four zones and four lines” territorial spatial planning framework with comprehensive risk governance. It further proposes that annual investment in disaster prevention as a share of government fiscal expenditure at all levels should be commensurate with disaster losses as a share of GDP; that a national catastrophe insurance system and a catastrophe insurance fund should be established; that the disaster risk reduction industry should be developed; that the three United Nations global agendas on climate change response, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development should be integrated; and that a national comprehensive disaster reduction strategy for super-resilience combining “harm elimination” with “benefit promotion” should be implemented.