Towards Proactive Adaptation to Disaster Risk and Climate Change: Designing a Decision Support Tool for Swedish Municipalities
2025
Bosiers, Taline Carole M | Johansson, Linnea
This study aims to discourage error-prone intuitive thinking in decision-making for proactive adaptation to disaster risk and climate change and to encourage the realisation of well-founded proactive adaptation measures by developing a decision support tool for Swedish municipal preparedness coordinators. Using a design research methodology, the researchers interviewed preparedness coordinators from 16 Swedish municipalities to find needs and limitations to decision-making on proactive adaptation and how existing decision-making approaches and risk and vulnerability analyses align with these needs. This data was then used to construct a new decision support tool that suits the municipal needs. The results show that municipal preparedness coordinators often use heuristics in the form of intuitive decision-making, with only a few municipalities using systematic analysis in their decision-making. Additionally, the existing risk and vulnerability analysis methods and decision-making approaches do not seem to fulfil the needs of the municipalities in their decision-making, often being too vague or resource-demanding to be useful. To design the decisions support tool, nine design criteria were developed based on the design purpose and constraints. Feedback sessions were conducted to evaluate the decisions support tool and find how it could be changed in future design iterations. Finally, it is discussed how the decision support tool’s usefulness may be hindered by significant contextual constraints in the work on disaster risk reduction in Swedish municipalities, which may need to be addressed before a decision support tool can reach its full potential.
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