Flood disaster industry-linked economic impact and risk assessment: a case study of Yangtze River Economic Zone

China is an extremely sensitive nation severely impacted by global climate change, with frequent floods in the Yangtze River Economic Zone causing severe socioeconomic losses and ecological and environmental issues. To investigate the potential industry-related economic losses and comprehensive hazards of flooding in the Yangtze River Economic Zone, as well as to investigate the comprehensive improvement of disaster resilience, this paper first uses an input–output model to account for the indirect economic losses caused by floods to various industries in different years. On this basis, a comprehensive flood risk assessment system was constructed from five aspects, including meteorological and geographical conditions, exposure, vulnerability, emergency response and recovery capacity, and disaster losses; the entropy weight method and TOPSIS method were used to rank the flood risks, while ArcGIS was used for visualization and analysis. The results indicate that the most severe economic losses affected by floods in 2020, 2017 and 2012 are in Anhui, Hunan and Sichuan, respectively; manufacturing, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery, transportation and storage, and electricity, heat and production and supply are all highly sensitive sectors that are severely impacted by flooding. The risk assessment indicates that the integrated flood risk in the upstream areas of Yunnan and Chongqing has been low and belongs to the low or medium–low risk area, whereas the integrated flood risk in the downstream areas is high, with Shanghai belonging to the high risk area in each of the three years. Lastly, effective regional flood risk management countermeasures are proposed.