Evaluation of Urban Vulnerability to Drought in Guanzhong Area
关中地区城市干旱脆弱性评价

With the great change of global climate and urbanization, drought is becoming a more and more urgent problem that affects human beings. Cities are especially suffering the threat of drought. Therefore, it is of great significance to study how urban cities cope with drought to ensure sustainable development. The concept of vulnerability provides a wonderful lens for us to make an in-depth analysis of this problem. This paper claims that Urban Vulnerability to Drought (UVD) refers to the sensibility of urban system to drought and a city's nature and state of suffering loss easily due to lacking response capacity. Evaluation analysis of Urban Vulnerability to Drought and the main contributing factors would be of great help to cities' coping with drought and achieving sustainable development. Therefore, this paper has established an evaluation system for UVD according to the connotation of UVD we have proposed. Besides, in the framework of regional comprehensive evaluation for vulnerability, it adopted the entropy-value method and contribution model to assess the urban vulnerability to drought in Guanzhong Area. This region, as the city concentration area located in the centre of Shanxi province, aggregates most of the population and industries in Shanxi but faces serious threat of drought. In this study, the data mainly come from the statistics of urban development and water use in this region in 2009. And the results show that: 1) the vulnerabilities of Weinan, Tongchuan, Xi'an and Baoji to drought are at an intermediate level, while Xianyang at a low level; 2) Xi'an is vulnerable to drought mainly resulting from the sensibility in social and ecological system, and Xianyang is vulnerable to drought mainly because of the social system's sensibility, while Weinan, Tongchuan and Baoji because of lacking abilities and resources for coping with drought. The main contributing factors are the drought sensibility and the natural and technical resources for copying with drought; 3) the spatial differentiation of UVD doesn't correspond with the discrepancy of social and economical development level in Guanzhong Plain and a positive correlation exists between UVD and the social and economical development. Moreover, the ability of coping with drought is affected by both human and natural factors, but is more determined by the latter. At the end of the paper, some measures relating to population, industrial restructuring, urban construction and environment management were proposed to reduce the urban vulnerability to drought.