Correlates of flood hazard adjustment adoption in four coastal communities

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Abstract

This study examines the prediction of three types of household flood hazard adjustment (emergency preparedness, structural mitigation, and nonstructural mitigation) by a comprehensive set of risk perception variables (expected personal consequences, affective response, hazard intrusive thoughts, and hazard intrusive discussions). These risk perception variables were supplemented by six contextual variables (flood information sources, perceived personal protection responsibility, hazard experience, hazard proximity, Community Rating Service (CRS) rating, and demographic characteristics). The data reveal that the risk perception scales measure psychometrically distinct constructs that are only significantly correlated with nonstructural mitigation. Moreover, contextual factors such as hazard information, hazard experience, hazard proximity, age, and home value have significant, but differing effects on the adoption of the three types of hazard adjustments. These results suggest that tailored outreach and information is needed to motivate the adoption of different types of flood hazard adjustments. This is especially important because increasing changes in the global climatic system are expected to produce flood threats of greater frequency and intensity.

Introduction

Floods pose a significant threat to most US communities, with floods striking 99% of all counties between 1996 and 2019 and producing the most damage from any natural hazard [1,2]. The flood hazard literature identifies a wide range of hazard adjustments—actions taken intentionally or unintentionally to reduce the risks from extreme events in the natural environment [3]. Communities can implement a variety of pre-impact flood hazard adjustments that include hazard mitigation, emergency response preparedness, and disaster recovery preparedness [4]. In practice, however, community hazard mitigation options such as community protection works, land use regulations, and building codes are limited because of the complex institutional and decision-making frameworks that are required for their implementation [5]. Consequently, household risk reduction measures need to play a significant role in flood hazard management [6,[7], [8]]). This makes it imperative that local officials better understand the process of household flood hazard adjustment adoption.

The aim of this study is to continue the search for variables that predict the adoption of household flood hazard adjustments. Specifically, we investigate the influence of four risk perception scales (expected personal consequences, affective response, hazard intrusive thoughts, and hazard intrusive discussions) along with six types of contextual variables (flood information sources, perceived personal protection responsibility, hazard experience, hazard proximity, community CRS rating, and demographic characteristics) on adoption of three types of flood hazard adjustments (emergency preparedness, structural mitigation, and nonstructural mitigation). Although previous research has studied many of these predictors of flood hazard adjustment adoption, the present study examines more comprehensive operationalizations of these variables. For example, as noted below, risk perception is often defined in terms of expected personal consequences, but the addition of affective response and hazard intrusiveness is hypothesized to improve the prediction of flood hazard adjustment adoption.

Section snippets

Correlates of household flood hazard adjustment adoption

Households’ flood hazard adjustments can be classified as structural, non-structural, and emergency preparedness. Structural hazard adjustments include elevating homes above base (”100-year”) flood level, installing external barriers to prevent water from entering the structure (dry floodproofing), and moving equipment such as furnaces to higher floors while allowing flood water to enter the structure (wet floodproofing). In contrast, non-structural measures include storing valuable items on

Research hypotheses

Based on the findings and limitations of previous research literature, this study examines the effects of risk perception and contextual variables on flood hazard adjustment adoption. Many studies have examined scales comprising multiple adjustments, but other studies have analyzed individual hazard adjustments, based on the rationale that these hazard adjustments might differ in the variables that predict them. For example, Brody et al. [12] reported that none of their ten independent

Study area and sample

Four coastal communities, two in Texas (Friendswood and League City) and two in Florida (Sarasota and Fort Meyers) were selected for this study. These jurisdictions have similar population sizes between 20,000 and 100,000 persons and share similar hydrological, elevation, and flood risk profiles associated with the Gulf of Mexico coast. A stratified random sample of 500 parcels within each community was drawn using the following flood zones: (i) within the FEMA-designated 100-year floodplain;

Descriptive analysis

Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics for all variables. Among the three hazard adjustment measures, respondents most often undertook emergency preparedness activities (M = 0.59), followed by non-structural mitigation (M = 0.29) and then structural mitigation (M = 0.07). Among the emergency preparedness items, a battery powered radio was the most common (M = 0.78) whereas a household flood emergency plan (M = 0.34) and a gas-powered electric generator (M = 0.33) were the least common.

Discussion

The fully specified models for all three categories of hazard adjustments—emergency preparedness, nonstructural mitigation, and structural mitigation—are limited by their low levels of reliability (α), which attenuates their correlations with other variables [72,73]. Values of α < 0.70 are sometimes dismissed as not meeting this “required level”, but this belief has no foundation in psychometric theory ([[74], [75]]). Instead, α should be used to determine if the reliability of a measure might

Conclusions

This research addresses an important challenge—understanding household adoption of flood hazard adjustments. Risk perception has been a major focus in the search for explanatory variables, but research on floods and other hazards has produced mixed results; some researchers report significant positive correlations between risk perception and hazard adjustment adoption, whereas others report nonsignificant correlations. The data in the present study yielded only modest correlations of the four

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on research supported by the US National Science Foundation (Grants 1129998 and 1826455). The findings and opinions reported are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the funding organization or those who provided assistance with various aspects of the study.

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