Capturing flood community perceptions for social vulnerability reduction and risk management planning
2022
Cruz-Bello, Gustavo Manuel | Alfie Cohen, Miriam
Reducing vulnerability is the aim of flood risk management plans, yet their success depends on acceptance and implementation by their community. It is important, then, to study approaches that encourage societal participation in decision-making. The present study combined three participatory methods to capture and understand local knowledge on flood vulnerability reduction in a coastal town in southern Mexico. As a feasibility outcome, we found that these kinds of approaches involving community participation and consultation are attainable and easy to integrate into the local planning processes of vulnerability reduction and flood risk management. On process outcomes, we found that the community is aware of the flood risk given by their spatial location, has taken actions to adapt, and proposed other actions to reduce their vulnerability. We found no quantitative relationship between the levels of flood delimited by the participatory geographic information systems approach and the community’s socioeconomic characteristics obtained by the house survey. Still, qualitative analysis of the three methods revealed that the collective memory of experiencing a flood plays a significant role in the measures the population takes to adapt and reduce vulnerability.
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