How effective are community‐based disaster reduction strategies? Evidence from the largest‐scale program so far

Strategies of community‐based disaster risk reduction have been advocated for more than 2 decades. However, we still lack in‐depth quantitative assessments of the effectiveness of such strategies. Our research is based on a national experiment in this domain: the “Comprehensive Disaster Reduction Demonstration Community” project, a governmental program running in China since 2007. Information on more than 11,000 demonstration communities was collected. Combined with the local disaster information and socioeconomic conditions, the spatiotemporal characteristics of these communities over 12 years and their differences in performance by region and income group were analyzed. We performed an attribution analysis for disaster risk reduction effectiveness. This is the first time a series of quantitative evaluation methods have been applied to verify the effectiveness of a large‐scale community‐based disaster risk reduction project, both from the perspective of demonstrative effects and loss reduction benefits. Here, we find that the project is obviously effective from these two perspectives, and the disaster loss reduction effectiveness illustrates clear regional differences, where the regional economic level and hazard severity act as important drivers. Significant differences of urban‐rural and income call for matching fortification measures, and the dynamic management of demonstration community size is required, since the loss reduction benefit converges when the penetration rate of the demonstration community reaches approximately 4% in a province. These and further results provide diverse implications for community‐based disaster risk reduction policies and practices.