How to improve smart emergency preparedness for natural disasters? ---- Evidence from the experience of ten pilot provinces in China for smart emergency

Abstract

The natural disasters faced by modern urban systems are complex, with multiple disaster-causing factors coexisting and secondary disasters occurring concurrently. With emergency management moving towards smart, natural disaster response has shifted from emergency-centered response to pre-disaster prevention. How to improve the government's natural disaster emergency preparedness has become an important issue that needs to be addressed. Based on the TOE (Technology-Organization-Environment) framework, the fsQCA method was used to explore the improvement path of emergency preparedness capacity of 10 pilot units in China to deal with natural disasters in 2020. Analyze the group effects and interrelationships of technology level, simultaneous supporting facilities, organizational construction, financial investment, external pressure, and social repercussions. The results show that: there exist four conditional groupings of high emergency preparedness in two modes. Two modes are organization-environment dual-drive and technology-organization-environment triple-drive, which have multiple concurrencies and follow the principle of consistent results. There are substitution effects in the conditional groupings of high emergency preparedness. There are causal asymmetries in the conditional groupings of high emergency preparedness and non-high emergency preparedness. This study aims to explore the smart emergency preparedness of ten pilot and to provide ideas for the overall development of “smart emergency response” and the improvement of emergency preparedness for natural disasters.

Keywords

• Emergency preparedness
• Emergency preparedness capabilities
• Smart emergency
• Natural disasters
• Qualitative comparative analysis