Risk perception of local stakeholders on natural hazards: implications for theory and practice

Abstract

Abstract. In Romania, local stakeholders' knowledge plays a role in making decisions for emergencies, supporting rescue officers in natural hazard events, coordinating, and assisting the affected populations physically and psychologically. However, despite the increasing occurrence and severity of natural hazards in the Iași metropolitan area (of north-eastern Romania), there is a lack of knowledge of local stakeholders on how to encourage the population regarding safety actions. For this reason, we interviewed 118 local stakeholders to determine their risk awareness and preparedness capacities over a set of natural hazards, in order to understand where deficiencies in knowledge, action, and trust are greatest. Results reveal substantial distinctions between different threats and among stakeholders based on their cognitive and behavioural roles in the communities. The roles of responsibility and trust are important driving factors shaping their perception and preparedness. Preparedness levels are low, and, for many, learning and preparatory actions are needed to build resilience to the negative occurrences of natural hazards. As the stakeholders' role is to direct interventions in affected areas by managing communication initiatives with the entire population of the community, there is a need to create stakeholders' networks, empowering local actors and serving as a bridge between authorities' decisions and local people, making effective risk management plans, and securing more lives and economies.

Targeting farmers’ heterogeneity to enrich climate change adaptation policy design: findings from northern Italy

“…As most variables are categorical and the HCPC method requires continuous variables, an MCA method was conducted as a pre-processing step to convert categorical variables into continuous ones (Montcho et al 2022). Through MCA, contingency tables were simplified to display the associations between categorical variables and identify the key factors that define the farms in a dataset with multiple exploratory variables (Mȃrgȃrint et al 2021).…”

Natural multi-hazard risk perception and educational insights among Geography and Tourism students and graduates amid the Covid-19 pandemic

“…Both cities have well-defined areas from which students are attracted, that largely overlap the aforementioned regions. As a direct consequence of the geographical position of Northeast Romania and Northern Serbia in the Central-South-Eastern continental part of Europe, the most representative natural hazards are hydrological and climate-related hazards (droughts, floods, soil erosion and landslides), and earthquakes [ 43 , 90 ], while many other hazards, such as sea-related, and volcanic ones are missing. A particular note of the natural hazard spectrum in the regions of interest concerns wildfires, that have a relatively larger incidence in Northern Serbia compared to Northeast Romania [ [91] , [92] , [93] ].…”

“…The preparedness for crisis situations associated with natural hazards is influenced by multiple socio-economic and cultural factors [ [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] , [43] , [44] ], as well as by the previous experience of such events [ [45] , [46] , [47] ]. Risk perception is vital for adequate preparedness [ 46 , [48] , [49] , [50] , [51] ], but there is also a risk perception paradox: people who have a high risk perception may choose not to prepare for natural hazards [ 52 ], due to various reasons.…”

Geo-Hydrological Hazard Impacts, Vulnerability and Perception in Bujumbura (Burundi): A High-Resolution Field-Based Assessment in a Sprawling City

“…In conditions of lack of databases on the different occurrences/events and damages incurred, the use of high-resolution field-based collection represents an effective way to obtain crucial information. The combination of different sources of information, including data collection, interviews, and focus groups to fill the gaps in institutional data collection, is an insight without which concrete prevention and mitigation strategies for vulnerability to geo-hydrological hazards are difficult to implement [46,59,70]. Indeed, it is hardly impossible to plan effective geo-hydrological risk mitigation strategies in a city without clearly identifying the area most vulnerable to these hazards [71,117].…”

“…Knowledge of what and how people perceive as causes of their vulnerability to hazards is necessary to offer effective mitigation strategies for their impact [57][58][59]. Perception is an intuitive judgment based on the process of collecting, selecting, and interpreting signals concerning the uncertain impacts of events and choosing how to respond [60,61].…”