Developing an indicator system for urban fire risk assessment

Abstract

With the acceleration of urbanization, the occurrence mechanism of urban fires has become increasingly complex, with various factors intertwined, significantly increasing the difficulty of fire risk assessment and prevention. Therefore, this review focuses on the typical influencing factors of industrial fires, residential fires, and urban wildfires, and classifies them into three types: human, social, and environmental factors. Regarding human factors, insufficient educational level and safety culture are the core causes of human factors in fires, which can lead to unsafe behaviors and increase the fire incidence. In terms of social factors, the level of economic development restricts the overall capacity for fire risk prevention and control by influencing infrastructure investment. Regarding environmental factors, high temperatures and low humidity can increase the flammability of combustibles, while strong winds can accelerate the spread of fire and expand the scale of disaster losses. In addition to meteorological factors, wildfires are also influenced by topographic features. The functional differences in different regions lead to obvious spatial disparities. Human factors mainly dominate the fire risks in industrial zones. For residential areas, human and social factors are the main reasons; in urban green spaces, environmental influences cannot be overlooked. The study shows that urban fire risk is the product of the interaction between human behavior, social systems, and environmental conditions in specific functional scenarios, and functional differentiation exacerbates the spatial heterogeneity of risks.