Community Perception of Flood Risk in Sweden

Abstract: Natural hazards, paired with affected communities’ exposure and vulnerability, have caused numerousfatalities and great economic losses worldwide in recent decades. Floods represent about one-third ofall natural hazards, and together with storms they comprise 77% of economic losses caused byextreme weather events from 1980 to 2006 in Europe and have been the main natural hazards inEurope for more than a century. Survey data of public risk perception were collected in Sweden andItaly through online surveys several times during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the respondents wereasked questions about risk perception regarding nine threats: epidemics, floods, droughts, earthquakes,wildfires, terror attacks, domestic violence, economic crises, and climate change. The survey explorespublic perception on five factors: experience, likelihood, potential impact, as well as preparedness andknowledge of the phenomenon. The survey data were analysed by using ordinal logistic regression,were the variable of previous flood experience along with socioeconomic factors were used to explorehow/if previous experience has any statistical significance and potentially affects risk perception. Inaddition, this thesis also presents a spatial analysis of respondents’ previous flood experience andprevious flood events in Sweden, to explore whether this is reflected in the survey data. The resultsshow that the effect of experience on likelihood, knowledge and preparedness is high, and womenhave a higher perceived risk in all variables except preparedness. The results of the spatial analysisshow that the majority of respondents with experience live in North Middle Sweden which correlateswell with the analysis of past flood events during the recent decade. These findings could potentiallybe used in continuous research regarding disaster risk reduction and developing frameworks,specifically how impacts and perception influence other variables such as vulnerability, behaviour, andgovernance.