Environmental disaster governance and rescue management performance: an exploratory quantitative evaluation of the CCMR-CL framework

Abstract

Disaster rescue performance reflects not only hazard severity but also the management systems that organise command authority, inter-organisational coordination, resource allocation, rescue-team standardisation, institutional learning, and the integration of digital information. These functions are usually studied separately, and their joint contribution to observed performance has rarely been tested against outcomes independent of how the functions themselves are coded. This study develops an interdisciplinary framework, CCMR-CL, integrating six management dimensions, and tests it against 38 major disaster events in China (2006–2025), each coded from official investigation reports and corroborating sources. A documentary performance index, built from four outcome components, was explained jointly by the six dimensions, with an adjusted R2 of 0.82; command coordination was the only dimension whose association survived bootstrap resampling, and the dimensions were intercorrelated enough that the result is best read as joint rather than separable influence. Because two of the four outcome components are conceptually close to two of the six predictors, the dimensions were also tested against an independent outcome index built only from activation delay, exposure-adjusted casualties, and economic loss; against this measure the joint explanatory power fell to 0.17, indicating that the documentary-index result substantially reflects shared construct content rather than a demonstrated relationship with objective outcomes. Closed-loop evaluation, measured from post-event activity, shows the weakest concurrent association, consistent with its temporal position in the framework. Performance differed by disaster type after adjusting for hazard severity, and mean performance did not rise after the 2018 national reform under formal testing. The study offers a measurable, interdisciplinary description of the documented rescue-management process, while treating its relationship to independently measured outcomes as not yet established.