Perception and Communication of Flood Risks: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research

By W. Kellens, T. Terpstra, P. de Maeyer. Risk Analysis, 2013

707 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Flood hazards are the most common and destructive of all natural disasters. For decades, experts have been examining how flood losses can be mitigated. Just as in other risk domains, the study of risk perception and risk communication has gained increasing interest in flood risk management. Because of this research growth, a review of the state of the art in this domain is believed necessary. The review comprises 57 empirically based peer‐reviewed articles on flood risk perception and communication from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The characteristics of these articles are listed in a comprehensive table, presenting research design, research variables, and key findings. From this review, it follows that the majority of studies are of exploratory nature and have not applied any of the theoretical frameworks that are available in social science research. Consequently, a methodological standardization in measuring and analyzing people's flood risk perceptions and their adaptive behaviors is hardly present. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in comparing results among studies. It is also shown that theoretical and empirical studies on flood risk communication are nearly nonexistent. The article concludes with a summary on methodological issues in the fields of flood‐risk perception and flood‐risk communication and proposes an agenda for future research.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df9ec7c29cbc1337070ff35386437c0a72d49d99

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In Atmospheric Science

Rebecca Morss

In Global and Planetary Change

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The behavioral turn in flood risk management, its assumptions and potential implications (2020, background): “A fundamental knowledge limitation is grounded in the limited predictive power of the theories applied so far (Kellens et al., 2013).”
Living with Floods: Protective Behaviours and Risk Perception of Vietnamese Households (2013, neutral): “(2004); Kreibich et al. (2011). 15 Bubeck et al.”
The effects of past hurricane experiences on evacuation intentions through risk perception and efficacy beliefs: A mediation analysis (2016, background): “…therefore have noted the insufficient ways that people’s past experiences with hazards (hurricanes and otherwise) have been measured in the existing literature, and they have identified the need to more thoughtfully study this concept (Weinstein 1989; Baker 1991; Lindell 2012; Kellens et al. 2013).”
Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management (2014, background): “While a number of recent reviews have attempted to distil best practice guidance from this rapidly growing literature (Kellens et al., 2013; Löfstedt and 6, 2008; Parker et al., 2009; Van Alphen et al., 2009; Wachinger et al., 2013), it is important to recognize that the very idea and purposes of ri”
Improvement of resilience of urban areas by integrating social perception in flash-flood risk management (2016, methodology): “In this case, according to the classification mentioned by Kellens et al. (2013), people adopt such behaviours when the flood is just about to occur or even when it is taking place.”