Filling the Behavioral Gap in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

Do only foolish people drown and only compulsive gamblers suffer flood losses?

Conventional wisdom is based on flawed underlying assumptions and the EU vision of a disaster- and climate-resilient society cannot be achieved by relying on behaviour-blind assessments and policy.

Whilst the behaviour of individuals, businesses and public services before, during and after a crisis has a significant impact on damages, recovery and resilience, current assessments fail to include such critical factors because they are hardly understood. Floods and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change.

Despite trillions of public funds invested, current flood reduction and planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives.

This is due to a mismatch between the rising application of risk, vulnerability and resilience assessments and the understanding of their empirical validity.

The overreaching goal of this proposal is to move from behaviour-blind to behaviour-aware assessments, indicators and policies to save lives and public money.

Lifting the current barriers to predicting and simulating risk perception and behaviour will create forefront knowledge and open new horizons.

Social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge making new empirical research essential to refine or replace existing theories.

This project will provide four demonstrators representative of the European and Mediterranean context, graded in size, wealth and exposure to reach general considerations: Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest and Algiers.

It is aiming at cross-validation on floods and transferability to other emergencies (technological disasters, epidemics, terrorism, etc).

It will launch a new line of research by providing behaviour-aware participatory assessments and indicators, spatially-explicit interactive short- and long-term simulation tools enabling decision-makers to refine their strategies and policies.