How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities Anik Glaus 1,2
&
Markus Mosimann 2,3,4 & Veronika Röthlisberger 2,3,4 & Karin Ingold 1,2,5
Received: 25 October 2019 / Accepted: 14 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding. Keywords Flooding . Flood risk management . Risk perception . Policy preferences . Policy design
Introduction A growing number of extreme flood events in Europe poses an increasing risk to people, assets, and infrastructure (Kundzewicz et al. 2018b). Damages and losses caused by floods are high and constitute a financial burden for numerous
European economies (Kron et al. 2019). However, increasing flood risk is not only due to changing climate conditions or human development in flood-prone areas (Löschner et al. 2017) but also to a lack of flood preparedness (Kundzewicz et al. 2020) and effective flood risk management (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007).
Communicated by Xiangzheng Deng * Anik Glaus [email protected] Markus Mosimann [email protected] Veronika Röthlisberger [email protected] Karin Ingold [email protected]
1
Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
2
Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Hochschulstrasse 4, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
3
Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Hallerstrasse 12, 3012 Bern, Switz
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