An improved typhoon risk model coupled with mitigation capacity and its relationship to disaster losses

Typhoons are among the most dangerous meteorological events, and they frequently cause human fatalities and significant economic loss. An accurate estimation of typhoon disaster risk has important implications in terms of forming disaster reduction strategies. Recent typhoon risk assessments fail to consider mitigation capacity and its quantitative relationships with other risk factors, causing uncertainties. To address this, mitigation capacity was used as the key parameter for building a novel risk assessment model with improved accuracy. A comprehensive assessment framework of mitigation capacity was designed covering the entire process of disaster prevention–resistance–rescue. This proposed method was applied and tested to Hainan Island. When mitigation capacity was included in the typhoon risk model, the correlation coefficient between typhoon risk and disaster losses increased by ca. 0.1 with different functions compared to common models, which do not include mitigation capacity. The typhoon risk model demonstrated better performance in terms of explaining actual disaster losses in the medium and high levels of typhoon hazards. This demonstrates that mitigation capacity plays an important role in controlling disaster losses. Owing to the high correlation and less parameter determination, the negative correlation function was recommended as the optimal equation for typhoon risk estimation when including mitigation capacity. The increased explanatory ability of this typhoon risk estimation model confirms its effectiveness in explaining disaster losses. These improvements can support the design of differentiated typhoon mitigation strategies for varying degrees of typhoon risk to minimise the losses from typhoons.