Abstract This paper presents a new method for quantifying regional vulnerability to natural hazards in China. In recent decades, the study of vulnerability has gained a position of centrality in natural hazards research. How to quantitatively assess vulnerability has raised much interest in academia. Researchers have proposed a variety of methods for quantitative assessment. But these methods are very sensitive to weights set for subindices. As a result, analytic results are often less convincing. A model based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used for the assessment of regional vulnerability to natural hazards in an attempt to improve existing analytical methods. Using a regional natural disaster system framework, this article constructs an input-output DEA model for the assessment of regional vulnerability, and takes China’s mainland as a case study area. The result shows that the overall level of vulnerability to natural hazards in mainland China is high. The geographical pattern is that vulnerability is highest in western China, followed by diminishing vulnerability in central China, and lowest vulnerability levels in eastern China. There is a negative correlation between the level of regional vulnerability and level of regional economic development. Generally speaking, the more economically developed a region, the lower its regional vulnerability.
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