The determinants of household's flood mitigation decisions in France – evidence of feedback effects from past investments

Claire Richert, Katrin Erdlenbruch and Charles Figuieres
Additional contact information
Claire Richert: IRSTEA, UMR G-EAU, Montpellier

No 2016.11, Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the determinants of private flood mitigation in France. We conducted a survey among 331 inhabitants of two flood-prone areas and collected data on several topics, including individual flood mitigation, risk perception, risk experience, and sociodemographic characteristics. We estimate discrete choice models to explain either the presence of precautionary measures implemented by the household, or the intention to take such measures. We test the robustness of the Protection Motivation Theory in France, discuss its scope and investigate the existence of feedback effects from past investments on people's protection intentions. Our results confirm that the Protection Motivation Theory is a relevant framework to describe the mechanisms of private flood mitigation in France, highlighting in particular the importance of threat appraisal, threat experience appraisal, and coping appraisal. Some sociodemographic features are also significant to explain private flood mitigation. Our results also give evidence for feedback effects as they suggest that implementing precautionary measures reduces perceptions of the risk of flooding. The existence of these feedback effects implies that intended measures, rather than implemented ones, should be examined to explore further the determinants of private flood mitigation.

Keywords: flood; risk; mitigation; risk perception; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 Q54 R22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://faere.fr/pub/WorkingPapers/Richert_Erdlenbr ... _FAERE_WP2016.11.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fae:wpaper:2016.11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dorothée Charlier ().