The Risk Perception Paradox—Implications for Governance and Communication of Natural Hazards

Abstract

This article reviews the main insights from selected literature on risk perception, particularly in connection with natural hazards. It includes numerous case studies on perception and social behavior dealing with floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires, and landslides. The review reveals that personal experience of a natural hazard and trust--or lack of trust--in authorities and experts have the most substantial impact on risk perception. Cultural and individual factors such as media coverage, age, gender, education, income, social status, and others do not play such an important role but act as mediators or amplifiers of the main causal connections between experience, trust, perception, and preparedness to take protective actions. When analyzing the factors of experience and trust on risk perception and on the likeliness of individuals to take preparedness action, the review found that a risk perception paradox exists in that it is assumed that high risk perception will lead to personal preparedness and, in the next step, to risk mitigation behavior. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, the opposite can occur if individuals with high risk perception still choose not to personally prepare themselves in the face of a natural hazard. Therefore, based on the results of the review, this article offers three explanations suggesting why this paradox might occur. These findings have implications for future risk governance and communication as well as for the willingness of individuals to invest in risk preparedness or risk mitigation actions.

Reuse Choice, Flood Risk and Resilience, and Characteristics of Counties with Brownfield Cleanups

“…Prevention and preparedness response for residents of all educational and cultural backgrounds and abilities remain pressing needs for all government levels [17,52,54,[104][105][106][107]. This work lays a foundation for future work factoring community building into revitalization efforts that expand and improve resilience.…”

“…However, this study derived a flood risk category with existing information that may not reflect true risks, given growing extreme weather and limitations in flood risk mapping, despite research showing that 88% of U.S. counties have been flood impacted in the past five decades even as sea level rises, coastal storm surges and increased precipitation result in more nuisance flooding in areas not considered flood risk areas [100][101][102][103][104][105][106]. A lack of national publicly available flood risk information and outdated updates impedes sound planning, investment, and good governance.…”

“…In this analysis, the median distance to water bodies in flood-plain locations served as a proxy flood-plain measure to estimate and categorize flood risk. Future analyses should explore other flood metrics, flood damage assessments, and watershed or county flood-risk planning, to examine flood risks to brownfields at different scales [105,106].…”

Drivers of risk perceptions about the invasive non-native plant Japanese knotweed in domestic gardens

“…However, the details and extent of the perception of such risks are inherently highly variable between individuals (Slimak and Dietz 2006;Vanderhoeven et al 2011;Gozlan et al 2013), are largely species dependent (Sharp et al 2011;Gozlan et al 2013;Verbrugge et al 2013), and do not always correlate with actual ecological risk (Andreu et al 2009;Gozlan et al 2013). People are generally poor at assessing risks (Wachinger et al 2013), frequently exaggerating some whilst downplaying others (Clayton and Myers 2009). The processes that lead to development of perceptions of risk are complex (Slovic 1999).…”

Exploratory Testing of an Artificial Neural Network Classification for Enhancement of the Social Vulnerability Index

“…Contemporary research on the human dimensions of environmental hazards typically falls into three paradigms: (1) the exploration of social vulnerability that potentially contributes to enhanced disaster impact; (2) the exploration of disaster resilience, the capacity for communities and individuals to ameliorate and recover from the impact of a disaster; and (3) exploration of social perceptions that can enhance or mitigate the impact of a disaster [1][2][3][4][5][6]. While efforts in all three areas advance our understanding of the human component of environmental hazards and disasters, social vulnerability has the longest record of research in the environmental hazards discipline of the three paradigms [2].…”