Resilience and Preparedness

Climate change and urbanization of floodplains are contributing to increasing flood risk internationally. This has prompted hydrologists to acknowledge the need to include social drivers of adaptive behavior in household flood risk adaptation strategies and modelling. Existing research of household adaptive behavior lacks appreciation for change over time, tends to focus on intentions and perceptions over empirical measurement of actions, and assumes ‘awareness’ is a straight-forward driver of action. This paper makes an original contribution by answering: what are the drivers of flood risk adaptation as implemented by flood-prone households (i.e., adaptive behavior) over time and following a meaningful engagement? 

We assess the relative impact of ‘prior awareness’, ‘prior non-flood actions’, and ‘prior adaptive behaviors’ on the adaptive behaviors that follow engagement. Data were collected during initial survey-interview engagements with 982 households and follow-up engagements with 641 households in two flood-prone regions of Melbourne, Australia. Descriptive analysis shows that 221 (34%) households were prompted by the engagement to implement household adaptive behaviors. Statistical analysis showed that the major impact pathway was: prior adaptive behavior predicted adaptive behaviors in response to the engagement – with measures of awareness not being significant. Qualitative analysis explains that participants viewed actionable adaptive behaviors as catalysts of more, and often larger-scale adaptive behaviors, demonstrating a pathway towards more effective flood risk adaptation strategies and modelling. Community engagement, rather than awareness, is shown to be an effective prompt for ‘spillovers’ of flood risk adaptive behaviors in which participants implement more and often larger-scale flood risk adaptation measures.

To participate, nicklas [dot] guldaker [at] keg [dot] lu [dot] se (contact Nicklas Guldåker.)