The embodiment of the invention discloses a method and device for estimating the destroying degree of a disaster area. The destroying degree of the disaster area can be estimated through a single VHR SAR image of the disaster area hit by a natural adversity. The method includes the steps that the obtained very high resolution synthetic aperture radar (VHR SAR) image of the disaster area hit by the natural adversity is divided into at least one subimage area; the gray level co-occurrence matrix corresponding to the ith subimage area is obtained, and according to the gray level co-occurrence matrix, at least one texture characteristic value of the ith subimage area is obtained; the texture characteristic value grades corresponding to the texture characteristic values of the ith subimage area are determined according to a preset grading strategy; according to the texture characteristic value grades corresponding to the texture characteristic values of the ith subimage area and a preset texture characteristic value weight, the grade of the destroying degree of the ith subimage area is obtained.