Combing D number theory and DEMATEL, a new method called D-DEMATEL to identify CSFs in emergency management is proposed.
Based on D-DEMATEL, the optimization of emergency management can be efficiently simplified into optimizing the CSFs.
D-DEMATEL is well addressed the fuzziness and subjectivity in linguistic assessment.
D-DEMATEL is well applicable to identify CSFs in emergency management which inherently has a linguistic assessment process.