Approaches to Assessing the Vulnerability of Large City Population to Natural and Man-Made Hazards Using Mobile Operators Data (Case Study of Moscow, Russia)

The complex nature of threats to large cities residents requires a rethinking of the existing methods for the vulnerability assessment of the population to various kinds of them. Moscow concentrates about 9% of the Russian population, and with the Moscow oblast—about 12%. The high level of spatial concentration of the population and its active dynamics determine the increased level of natural and man-made risk in the city. The purpose of this study is to assess the vulnerability of the Moscow population to natural and man-made hazards, taking into account the actual population size and its movement in the city within different time cycles (daily and weekly-seasonal). Trying to find an appropriate solution, authors used alternative sources of statistical information—mobile operators data. The use of these data made it possible to obtain more detailed information on the state of socio-geographical systems, to overcome barriers associated with the incompleteness and ‘static’ nature of official statistical information (data provided by Rosstat). Mobile operators data allow obtaining more reliable depictions of the localization of its users at a certain point in time, which made it possible to adjust and clarify the current ideas about the distribution of the population in Moscow. As a result of the study, it was shown that for the center of Moscow and for New Moscow, the population vulnerability level is much higher than reflected in official documents. On the contrary, in the peripheral areas of Old Moscow, the potential risks are reduced because the real population density is significantly lower than it is estimated in the calculations provided by Rosstat.