With the increasing serious problems in climate change, the natural disasters related to climate phenomenon became larger and diversified. As the impact of climate change is closely associated with human’s settlement, energy, food, and ecosystem, es...
With the increasing serious problems in climate change, the natural disasters related to climate phenomenon became larger and diversified. As the impact of climate change is closely associated with human’s settlement, energy, food, and ecosystem, establishing policies responding to the damages resulted from the global climate change has become an important issue. On the other hand, in case of urban regions, there is a high risk of natural disasters due to the creation of artificial space resulted from the urbanization. In Korea, the number of urbanized areas has increased rapidly since the 1960s. However, we still lack of preventive measures to take against the disasters resulted from such climate changes. In fact, there are a multiple number of researches on the adaptation measures based on the prediction of such land use changes to occur in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the relevant influential factors to establish adaptation measures against the climate change in the future especially in Korea and evaluate the vulnerability resulted from the climate change accordingly.
Therefore, this study aims to analyze the changes in land use resulted from the urbanization to evaluate the vulnerability from the natural disasters in urban regions due to climate change and identify the impact of the changes in urban regions and green coverage area on the vulnerability of natural disasters. In the first place, this study sets up the climate change scenarios using the SRES scenario developed by IPCC and predicts the land use changes in the future using the CLUE model that is available to identify the land use changes by reflecting the environmental changes and social and economic changes. After then, this study draws the damage function of natural disasters by considering the natural, physical, and humanistic elements in making an empirical analysis of the natural disaster characteristics to evaluate the vulnerability resulted from natural disasters. Finally, this study evaluates the vulnerability from the natural disasters by applying the predicted amount of land use changes into damage function.
Our research findings are as follows: First, as a result of predicting the land use changes in the future resulted from climate changes, it is found that there are patterns of spatially significant land use changes by each scenario. A1 scenario shows the most rapidly urbanized area. B1 scenario shows the land use patterns in the past and the most similar change patterns and B2 scenario shows the biggest increase ratio of forest area. Second, this study draws the damage function of natural disasters. As a result, it is found that the most influential factors to the damages from natural disasters are annual precipitation, fiscal self-reliance ratio, forest, urbanized areas, waters, density of population, and wetland and such factors are divided into natural factors, disaster-preventive factors, and land use factors. To look at the estimated coefficients, it is found that when the number of urbanized area increased by 1%, the damage increased by 0.46% and when the forest area increased by 1%, the damage of natural disasters decreased by 0.75%. In addition, it is found that in addition to natural factors, fiscal self-reliance ratio shows a big correlativity and the policies and systems related to disasters is an important factor to reduce the vulnerability from disasters. Third, as a result of evaluating the vulnerability from the natural disasters depending on the climate change scenarios, A1 and A2 scenarios show an increased damage from natural disasters to 29.26% and 14.39%, respectively in 2030 and B1 and B2 scenarios show an decreased damage from natural disasters to 1.18% and 16.69%, respectively. This suggests that the area of urbanized regions and green zone has a big impact on the vulnerability from natural disasters.
In case that the increase of urbanized regions is inevitable, it is necessary to obtain green coverage area by minimizing the forest destruction and reduce the damage from natural disasters by regulating the development restriction area, as the adaptation measures against the vulnerability from natural disasters. Besides, it is necessary to obtain the population density related policies and the fiscal self-reliance for disaster prevention and establish the adaptation measures against the vulnerability from the natural disasters when making a city plan. Furthermore, as a result of evaluating the vulnerability from disasters depending on climate change scenarios, it is found that the urbanization is performed at a similar level to the past; some agricultural areas and grasslands are converted into forest areas; and B1 scenario that regulates the development restriction are most appropriate for the reduction of vulnerability from natural disasters. Therefore, minimizing forest destruction and taking continuous disaster prevention measures are expected to reduce the vulnerability from natural disasters.
This study is significant in that it analyzes the land use patterns in the past in carrying out an evaluation of the vulnerability from natural disasters and predicts the land use changes by scenario by making a modelling of the land use changes unlike the existing researches that evaluate the current vulnerability to evaluate the vulnerability for the future by scenario and that it is expected to be used as a tool for determining policy directions toward establishing disaster prevention measures in response to the future climate changes.