At 07:49, 14 April 2010, the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, with the epicenter located at 33.1° N and 96.7° E and at an altitude of 4300 m, and an epicentral intensity of Modified Mercalli scale IX. It was the first strong earthquake that struck the high-altitude, hypoxia-prone Tibetan plateau primarily inhabited by ethnic minorities since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which has caused a huge loss of lives and property and adversely impacted the economic and social development of the area. The 2010 Yushu Earthquake was an earthquake disaster with the greatest destruction, widest spatial extent, and greatest difficulty for relief efforts in the history of Yushu, involving 19 townships in six counties of the prefecture. As verified by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, Ministry of Public Security, and the Yushu Prefecture Government, the earthquake killed 2698 people and caused government agencies to list 270 missing persons, who were mostly in Jiegu Town of Yushu County. The earthquake also caused a direct economic loss of RMB 44 billion Yuan. The severe environmental conditions in Yushu and limited infrastructural support for disaster relief to remediate the impacts on the earthquake victims were also rare in the history of earthquake disaster relief. This article focuses on the characteristics of the high-altitude Yushu Earthquake assessment and response, and summarizes the experiences and lessons of government and society in responding to this earthquake. The assessment of and response to the Yushu Earthquake will provide helpful references for high plateau earthquake response in the future.
To achieve sustainable development, understanding of the impact of global environmental change on natural resources and the frequency, intensity, and spatial-temporal patterns of all kinds of hazards should be advanced. In recent years, severe losses of human lives and property have been caused by very large-scale natural hazards all over the world, such as the freezing rain and snowstorm disaster in China in 2008, Typhoon Sidr in Bangladesh in 2007, and Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005. Strengthening the study on integrated disaster risk governance has become a pressing issue of sustainable development. Supported by the Chinese National Committee for the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change(CNC-IHDP), its Working Group for Risk Governance proposed to the IHDP in 2006 to launch a new international research project on integrated risk governance(IRG) in the context of global environmental change. The IRG-Project was accepted by the IHDP Scientific Committee as a pilot science project in 2008 and was approved in 2010 as a full IHDP core science project under the Strategic Plan 2007–2015. The research foci of this international science project will be on the issues of science, technology, and management of integrated disaster risk governance based on case comparisons around the world, in order to advance the theories and methodologies of integrated disaster risk governance and to improve the practices of integrated disaster reduction in the real world.
This article analyzes the risk assessment and risk transfer models of large-scale disasters in line with the characteristics of such disasters. A large-scale disaster risk assessment model based on the Regional Disaster System concept is developed: large-scale disaster risk(RL) is a function of the disaster triggering hazard(H), the vulnerability of the concerned objects(V), and the stability of the contextual hazard-formative environment(E), or RL = f(H, V, E). Based on our discussions, we propose that large-scale disaster risk transfer in China should be supported by governments at all levels, operated by insurance companies, and the responsibilities should be shared by all stakeholders. At the global level, large-scale disaster risk transfer should employ a uniform definition and be characterized by government support, market operation, public participation, disaster mitigation, and risk sharing.
