Assessing Urban Flood Resilience with Unascertained Measurement Theory: A Case Study of Jiangxi Province, China

With the acceleration of global climate change and urbanization, urban flooding disasters have become increasingly frequent, posing significant threats to urban safety and sustainable development. Enhancing Urban Flood Resilience (UFR) has become a central issue in urban risk management and spatial planning. This study aims to scientifically assess UFR by employing the core concepts of resistance, recovery, and adaptation from urban resilience theory. A set of 20 indicators for assessing UFR is selected from four aspects: infrastructure, social economy, technological monitoring, and the ecological environment. Addressing the limitations of traditional evaluation methods, which struggle to effectively handle data gaps and ambiguous boundaries, and fail to balance subjective and objective weights, this study introduces the unascertained measure theory and adopts a combined weighting method to construct a UFR evaluation model. Using 2023 statistical data from Jiangxi Province, a comprehensive evaluation of flood resilience was conducted across 11 prefecture-level cities within the province. The analysis indicates that, among level-2 indicators, infrastructure holds the highest weight at 43.7%. Regarding resilience dimensions, resistance dominates with a weight of 54.6%. Furthermore, significant spatial disparities exist in flood resilience levels across Jiangxi Province: high resilience cities are distributed in central and northern Jiangxi, moderately high resilience cities account for the largest proportion. Only one city, Pingxiang, exhibits moderate resilience.