How awareness and confidence affect flood-risk precautionary behavior of Greek citizens: the role of perceptual and emotional mechanisms

Abstract

Abstract. This study examines the mechanisms of flood-risk precautionary behavior among Greek citizens. To that end, we specify and test a mediation model in which awareness-raising factors and confidence attitudes influence the citizens' current flood preparedness and preparedness intention through perceptual and emotional processes. Raw data were obtained via an online survey that received 1855 responses. Causal relations were tested by means of structural equation modeling (SEM). Overall, results indicate that risk perception and worry are significant drivers of preparedness intention. In particular, they act as mediating variables, explaining how flood experience, access to more risk information, vulnerability awareness, and trust in authorities affect citizens' intention to invest in precautionary measures. Especially trust was found to have a negative effect on worry, leading to lower preparedness levels. Worry was also found to have a significant role in explaining the current preparedness levels. Interestingly, citizens who had already undertaken precautionary measures in the past appear to be more willing to invest in more measures. Implications for improving flood-risk management in Greece are discussed.

Hydrogeological and Climatological Risks Perception in a Multi-Hazard Environment: The Case of Greece

“…Our results provide evidence of the central role, in terms of a significant positive effect, that disaster experience and awareness have on threat perceptions and coping appraisals, which, in turn, are shown to affect individual preparedness (shown also by Poussin et al [44] and Papagiannaki et al [40], which focus on flood risk perception).…”

“…Finally, based on theoretical and empirical models of protection motivation processes [40,44,63], we developed a cognitive map of the resulted relationships among the set of the examined variables to investigate the paths linking risks perceptions and coping appraisals with awareness, confidence and preparedness against climate-related hazards. Demographic attributes are also included in the analysis.…”

“…The average number of daily unique visitors to the website exceeds 350,000. Surveys related to weather hazards have been systematically posted with a very strong public response [40,59].…”

“…Figure 11 illustrates the statistically significant correlations found between the survey variables across the hydrogeological and climate-related hazards. The structure is based on theoretical models of protection motivation processes in psychology and their implementation in empirical research on flood-risk precautionary behaviors [40,44,63]. The exact correlation results (Spearman's rho coefficients) can be found in Tables A1 and A2 in Appendix A.…”

“…The importance of public perception, especially with regard to hydrogeological hazards, is reflected in the growing number of relevant studies carried out in the recent years [30,31], focusing mostly on areas of Europe and the Americas. These studies explore the perception of likelihood and significance of the impacts of future disasters [25,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and the effect of disaster experience and risk communication on individual's perceptions and precautionary behaviors [40]. They also study the awareness and knowledge of individuals on hydrogeological hazards [25,37,41,42], adoption of self-protection measures and preparedness actions [41,43,44], trust in institutions [35,42], as well as emotions affecting the degree of preparedness against risk [32,36,37,42].…”