How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities

Glaus, Anik; Mosimann, Markus; Röthlisberger, Veronika; Ingold, Karin (2020). How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities. Regional environmental change, 20(120), pp. 1-17. Springer 10.1007/s10113-020-01705-7

Preview

Text Glaus2020_Article_HowFloodRisksShapePoliciesFloo.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (1MB) | Preview

Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

225 since deposited on 30 Oct 2020
161 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item