Cross-border renewable energy projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) face complex and overlapping risks, yet existing research lacks a dynamic, lifecycle-based quantitative framework for emergency management. This study proposes a resilience-lifecycle evaluation framework to address this gap.
The framework integrates DEMATEL and entropy weighting for indicator optimisation, a normal cloud model to handle fuzziness and uncertainty, and an enhanced Dempster–Shafer evidence theory for dynamic multi-year data fusion. It is applied to and tested on the Nam Ou River Cascade Hydropower Project (2020–2024), with sensitivity analysis conducted to assess robustness under parameter uncertainty.
Emergency management performance improved from “good” to “excellent” (confidence level 0.772 by 2024). Key resilience drivers are cross-border power coordination, host government efficiency and flood response timeliness. Although reactive capabilities dominate the immediate weight distribution, their effectiveness is structurally conditioned by prior investments in preparedness and physical redundancy, underscoring that institutional coupling between project systems and host country governance is the decisive driver of resilience.
The framework was tested on a single hydropower case study, thereby advancing the frontier of dynamic resilience evaluation in cross-border infrastructure and providing theoretical implications for integrating lifecycle logic with multi-source evidence fusion, while highlighting the need for broader multi-project testing to strengthen generalisability.
The framework enables decision-makers to proactively monitor emergency resilience through standardised multi-year performance tracking, supporting sustainable infrastructure development and regional energy security in BRI cross-border projects.
This study introduces a novel lifecycle-based quantitative resilience framework that couples resilience mechanisms (absorption, adaptation, restoration, learning) with the full emergency lifecycle (prevention, preparation, response, recovery), employs an improved Dempster–Shafer temporal fusion algorithm for recursive synthesis of heterogeneous multi-year evidence, and demonstrates empirically that institutional coupling, rather than technical redundancy alone, drives resilience in transnational hydropower projects, shifting the paradigm from reactive emergency response to proactive lifecycle governance.
