ratio, the more likely the assets, as represented by sensitivity, will be damaged.
In order to employ the energetic hierarchy concept to analyze the study area’s sensitivity to flooding, the emergy content of land use was calculated based on previous calculations of empower density for the various land uses in the study area (Table 1). The items with higher emergy content per area (e.g. residential, commercial,etc.) represent the land uses with higher energetic hierarchy, which are also more sensitive to flood events.
Fig. 4 shows the emergy content of land uses which represents the spatial pattern of sensitivity to flooding in the western coastal plain of Taiwan. Higher values of sensitivity (the central urban area of Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung) imply the possibility of higher economic loss when it is flooded. Since agricultural areas require energy from both natural environments and services of human societies, the agricultural areas in the vicinity of major metropolitan regions have higher emergy contents than natural areas