LAUSR

Abstract Frequent geological disasters such as debris flow and landslides in seismic zones are the primary causes of regional population and infrastructure losses. In this paper, the Contribution Weighting Superposition (CWS) model was used to establish a quantitative vulnerability assessment method of geohazards in the Qiaojia seismic area (SW China). The CWS approach uses three appraisal dimensions: exposure, response, and resilience. A total of 326 historical hazardous locations were selected and combined with ten subfactors—population density (PD), road density (RD), economic density (ED), building density (BD), farmland coverage (FC), ratio of primary industry (RPI), ratio of government revenue (RGR), urbanization rate (UR), GDP per capita (GPC), and disposable income per capita of rural permanent residents (RPR)—for predicting geological hazards vulnerability. Finally, Cohen's kappa coefficient (k) was applied to examine the consistency between the appraisal outcomes and the actual data concerning hazards. Results show that the overall vulnerability in this area is medium and above, with a high risk of widespread damage from potential calamities. PD, GR, and RPR are the three subfactors that most significantly affect the spatial distribution characteristics of vulnerability. The k value associated with the assessed and actual hazard observation data was 0.771 (95% CI 0.771 ± 0.039) with an approximate significance of P