Abstract: Unclear concept and scale positioning as well as imperfect evaluation system are the main obstacles of vulnerability evaluation.Starting from the concept,factor and scale of the coupled human-natural systems vulnerability,this article made it clear that the evaluation objective is in regional scale and the analysis framework is composed by climate change and system structural elements.Based on expounding the features of the coupled human-natural systems vulnerability,the authors established firstly an evaluation system of the coupled human-natural systems vulnerability,including the three series factor indexes of sensitivity, exposure and the adaptability,and three evaluation levels of background vulnerability, potential vulnerability and realistic vulnerability according to system relations of the three series factor indexes.Secondly,taking the hilly areas in southern China as an example,the authors established an evaluation index system of coupled human-environment interaction systems vulnerability in the erosion-prone region,which includes regional natural disasters such as debris flow,landslide,drought and flood,and which relies on the principles including the scientific principle,dominant factors principle,pertinence principle,applied principle and operability principle.Finally,the authors concluded that:(1)the regional coupled human-environment interaction systems vulnerability concerns with natural disasters under global climate change disturbance;(2)the sensitivity and damageability are the essential attribute of the vulnerability,while the sensitivity,exposure and adaptability are system factors of the vulnerability;(3)the natural disaster frequency can be seen as the location exposure indexes to reflect the space concentricity of disaster occurences,while the real disaster degree,as a reference value,can be provided to verify the results of the vulnerability evaluation indexes screening,index weights determinating,model validation and threshold value analysis.The research has some references for improving the theory and method of the research on regional coupled human-environment interaction systems vulnerability in different regions under the consistent framework.

Key words: region, coupled human-environment interaction systems, vulnerability, evaluation index