Study on Flood Resilience Based on the DPSIR Framework from the “Engineering–Ecological–Management” Perspective: A Case Study of Zhejiang Province

Abstract

Against the backdrop of global climate change and rapid urbanization, extreme rainstorm events have become increasingly frequent, and urban–rural flood risk has continued to intensify, rendering flood resilience an essential concern for sustainable urban and rural development. To address the serious homogenization of existing indicator systems, the unclear associations among cross-dimensional factors, and the weakness of spatial-differentiation research in current flood resilience evaluations, this study builds a flood resilience evaluation indicator system for Zhejiang Province containing 18 indicators from the “Engineering-Ecological-Management” (EEM) perspective, based on the “Driving-Pressure-State-Impact-Response” (DPSIR) framework. A combined weighting method integrating the entropy weight (EW) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine indicator weights, and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied to evaluate the Flood Resilience Index (FRI) of 11 cities in Zhejiang Province from 2004 to 2024. The Barrier Degree Model (BDM) is adopted to identify the critical obstacle factors affecting the improvement of flood resilience, and the grey relational analysis (GRA) method is applied to analyze the correlation among engineering, ecological and management factors. The results show that: (1) from 2004 to 2024, the provincial average FRI of Zhejiang Province rose from 0.1657 to 0.5021, with a growth rate of 203.09%, exhibiting an evolutionary pattern of “comprehensive improvement with accelerated growth in the later stage”; (2) in 2024, the spatial pattern of FRI presents a hierarchical agglomeration characteristic of “Fifth grade leading, Fourth grade contiguous, and Third grade dispersed”: Hangzhou, Wenzhou, and Quzhou attain fifth grade flood resilience, Zhoushan remains at third grade, and the other cities are at fourth grade. From 2004 to 2024, the inter-city FRI gap follows an inverted-V trajectory of “large-small-large”; (3) The evolution of the key barrier factors is highly consistent with the different stages of flood management in Zhejiang, having passed through three phases: bridging shortcomings in engineering infrastructure, advancing “engineering and ecology” in tandem, and widening engineering gaps superimposed with new barrier factors. The “maximum pumping and drainage capacity of pumping stations and pipe networks” has consistently ranked as the primary barrier factor; and (4) the pairwise correlations among the engineering, ecological, and management dimensions are differentiated: the “engineering-management” correlation is the highest (0.7957), the “engineering-ecological” correlation is intermediate (0.7488), and the “ecological-management” correlation is the lowest (0.7051), indicating that coordination between green infrastructure and the management system remains weak as flood resilience improves. On this basis, this study proposes differentiated flood resilience improvement strategies for cities in Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western Zhejiang from the three aspects of engineering defense, ecological restoration, and management coordination, providing decision-making support for the construction of flood-resilient cities.