Seismic risk-coping behavior in rural ethnic minority communities in Dali, China

The first Chinese Housing Earthquake Insurance (HEI) program was launched in Dali in 2015. Dali is an ethnic minority autonomous prefecture in southwest China, and is severely vulnerable to seismic hazards. This paper aims to understand household-level seismic risk-coping behavior, namely willingness to pay for HEI and structural retrofit, in rural ethnic minority communities (EMC) in Dali, and then to identify factors that could significantly affect their behavior to increase their possibility of successful disaster response. The seismic risk-coping behavior among rural households of EMC in Dali is surveyed and the relationship between their behavior and the affecting factors are measured by the Binary Logit Model. The results indicate that both HEI and structural retrofit are not widely adopted by households; contrarily, most prefer relying on fiscal subsidies to cope with seismic risk instead of taking precautionary action. Their behavior has been found to be positively influenced by risk perception, and negatively affected by fiscal subsidies. Moreover, HEI uptake shows a positive relationship with insurance experience and household income, but a negative correlation with migrant-worker ratios. In addition, households with buildings having higher anti-seismic capacity are more reluctant toward structural retrofit. However, ethnicity, religious belief, age, education and gender have no significant impact on behavior. Results of this work may add to further acquisition of household-level seismic risk-coping behavior adoption among these communities in need, along with providing implications for implementing seismic risk reduction in rural EMC.