Conceptualising risk communication barriers to household flood preparedness

Abstract

Accelerating flood risk is outstripping household preparedness, leading to higher costs when disasters occur. This has profound implications for the governance of urban areas on and around floodplains which often hold most of the responsibility for managing this risk. Effective community-wide flood preparedness strongly depends on human behaviour patterns before (yet-to-be experienced or imagined) unprecedented events. Whilst education is an accepted approach to changing human behaviour patterns, risk communications have not succeeded in prompting preparedness. We provide a systematic review using Steg & Vlek's extended General Framework because it describes the four key issues that, unless addressed, can impede risk communications’ ability to promote behaviour change.

The results suggest current research and practice gaps remain in what behaviour is targeted, what is communicated, how it is communicated, and what is learnt from evaluating education campaigns. A predominant focus of ‘get ready’ flood lists on response rather than anticipatory preparedness items may decrease their relevance for households. Education campaigns may fail to change relevant preparedness behaviours because they are perceived as irrelevant, not attuned to households’ important beliefs or agency, employ counter-productive messaging strategies, or fail to meet best practices for communicating actionable risk. Effective education messaging might well depend on co-production of local contextualised content between emergency agencies and households.

It is a clear finding of this review that current research and practice is highly limited by scholarships’ theoretical and methodological issues. We argue addressing scholarship gaps can inform urban governance arrangements, and thereby better support efforts to foster household and community flood preparedness. This will have inordinate value for emergency agencies, often tasked with preparedness-through-education, and the communities they serve.