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International audience; “Behavior-blind” risk assessments, mapping, and policy do not account for individual responses to risks, due to challenges in collecting accurate information at scales relevant to decision-making. There is useful spatial information in social survey data that is sometimes analyzed for spatial patterns despite potential biases. This article explores whether risk perception and adaptive behavior can be inferred from census and hazard exposure data with a specifically designed survey. An underlying question is what precautions surveys should take before mapping the results. We find that a hybrid multilevel regression and (synthetic) poststratification (MRP-MRSP) model can facilitate the transition from individual survey data to small-area estimations at different scales, including 200-m grid cells. We demonstrate this model using municipal-level survey data collected in the Paris region, France. We find that model accuracy is not decreased at finer scales provided there is a strong spatial predictor such as hazard exposure. Our findings show that a wide range of flood risk perception and evacuation behavior can be estimated with such downscaling techniques. Although this type of modeling is not yet commonly used among geographers, our study suggests that it can improve mapping of survey results and, in particular, can provide spatially explicit behavioral information for risk assessment and policy.

There is an increasing rise in the number of publications addressing social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation (SVRA) aspects of natural hazards and climate change. Despite the abundance of research in this field, a systematic understanding of how these studies are theoretically grounded is lacking.In this study, we conducted a systematic review of 4432 articles that address SVRA across a range of disciplinary fields (e.g. psychology, sociology, geography, mathematics) and natural hazards (e.g. floods, droughts, landslides, storm surges, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions). We investigate the extent to which these studies explicate the frameworks, theoretical constructs or theories they rely on.Our findings indicate that about 90% of the studies under consideration do not explicitly refer to a theoretical underpinning. Overall, theories focusing on individuals' SVRA were more frequent than those focusing on systems, society, groups, and networks. Furthermore, the uptake of theories varied according to the hazard investigated and field of knowledge, being more frequent in wildfire and flood studies and articles published in social science journals.We argue that the abundance of empirical material in SVRA research that lacks explicit theoretical grounding is objectionable. As a result, SVRA research seems to spin in circles: researchers repeatedly conduct similar analyses in different geographical settings with inconsistent or incommensurable findings. Thus, we recommend making theoretical considerations salient to foster more transparent, comparable, and robust empirical research on SVRA.

International audience; Unlike the vast majority of European capitals, and despite growing income inequality, descriptive measures of socioeconomic segregation seem to show a desegregation trend in Bucharest over the last two decades. Socioeconomic segregation and environmental justice studies provide completing insights of the intricated uneven geographies of social, economic and environmental disparities of post-socialist cities. And Bucharest is paradoxically the most populated and yet less studied of the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper explores changes in the patterns of socioeconomic segregation in post-socialist Bucharest, sheds more light on the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and the patterns of segregation, and includes 'attractor' and 'repellent' environmental factors, contributing to combine environmental justice and socioeconomic segregation approaches. Despite the apparently continuous desegregation trend, and even when controlling for the presence and proximity of other predictors, environmental factors play an increasing role in shaping local socioeconomic segregation patterns. This would suggest the need for consideration of the environmental factors in public policies aimed at mitigating the social cost of the transition and residential segregation. This should also lead to use descriptive measures of segregation more cautiously and to explore the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics, environmental conditions and the local patterns of segregation instead.

One of the key challenges for risk, vulnerability, and resilience research is how to address the role of risk perceptions and how perceptions influence behaviour. It remains unclear why people fail to act adaptively to reduce future losses, even when there is ever richer information available on natural and human-made hazards (flood, drought, etc.). The current fragmentation of the field makes it an uphill battle to cross-validate the results of existing independent case studies. This, in turn, hinders comparability and transferability across scales and contexts and hampers recommendations for policy and risk management. To improve the ability of researchers in the field to work together and build cumulative knowledge, we question whether we could agree on (1) a common list of minimal requirements to compare studies, (2) shared criteria to address context-specific aspects of countries and regions, and (3) a selection of questions allowing for comparability and long-term monitoring. To map current research practices and move in this direction, we conducted an international survey – the Risk Perception and Behaviour Survey of Surveyors (Risk-SoS). We find that most studies are exploratory in nature and often overlook theoretical efforts that would enable the comparison of results and an accumulation of evidence. While the diversity of approaches is an asset, the robustness of methods is an investment. Surveyors report a tendency to reproduce past research design choices but express frustration with this trend, hinting at a turning point. To bridge the persisting gaps, we offer several recommendations for future studies, particularly grounding research design in theory, improving the formalisation of methods, and formally comparing theories and constructs, methods and explanations while collecting the most-in-use themes and variables and controlling for the most-in-use explanations.

International audience; The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) mark a recent paradigm shift of FRM towards solutions that use nature-derived features, processes and management options to improve water retention and mitigate floods. Yet, the empirical evidence on the effects of NBS across various settings remains fragmented and their implementation faces a series of institutional barriers. In this paper, we adopt a community expert perspective drawing upon LAND4FLOOD Natural flood retention on private land network (https://www.land4flood.eu) in order to identify a set of barriers and their cascading and compound interactions relevant to individual NBS. The experts identified a comprehensive set of 17 barriers affecting the implementation of 12 groups of NBS in both urban and rural settings in five European regional environmental domains (i.e., Boreal, Atlantic, Continental, Alpine-Carpathian, and Mediterranean). Based on the results, we define avenues for further research, connecting hydrology and soil science, on the one hand, and land use planning, social geography and economics, on the other. Our suggestions ultimately call for a transdisciplinary turn in the research of NBS in FRM.

International audience; The recent catastrophic floods in China, Belgium and Germany underscore the importance of building climate-resilient cities. We represent a consortium that has proposed a comprehensive climate-adaptation programme, one that can guide urban decision-making and governance to better prepare for future climate-related events. Such efforts hinge on five principles learnt from earlier disasters. The world must: improve early-warning systems and strengthen flood barriers and civil protection, in particular for smaller watersheds; develop ‘sponge’ cities and landscapes that harness nature-based flood-risk mitigation; carry out climate risk assessments of critical infrastructure such as hospitals, transport and freshwater supply; climate-proof exposed buildings; and reinforce action with strong political cooperation and solidarity, particularly with the most vulnerable groups of people.

International audience; Social media have sparked increasing appeal for improving emergency management. Many have advocated the use of Social Media for Emergency Management (SMEM) to disseminate early warnings. Resorting to the massive but unstructured inVoluntary Geographic Information (iVGI) from social media during disaster response phase has been encouraged for rapid assessment, location and mapping of people and events, for monitoring the expressed needs and for observing human behavior in crisis dynamics. SMEM encompasses top-down – public information, community engagement – bottom-up – situational awareness, urgent needs collection – and many-to-many information flows – allowing a large number of users to communicate with each other simultaneously in real-time. However, operationalizing social media data in real-time during emergency situations might not be as practical as ex post facto retrospective analyses usually suggest. We question the use of SMEM and the unchallenged expectations that they allow for a faster and more widespread dissemination of early warnings, more citizens involvement and offer a richer and more contextualized crowdsourced feedback than classic emergency channels. We analyze the usefulness of geotagged information to monitor the unfolding of a crisis in real time and to accurately detect events and map people. We also question if the use of social media for emergency management is conditioned by local context and governance, by making a comparison between European countries. We offer a critical review of the literature, an SMEM analytical framework, and then empirical work based on large Twitter datasets collected from three different terror attacks in Europe: the Paris attacks in November 2015, the Brussels attacks in March 2016, and the Nice attack in July 2016. The results reveal important delays in warnings and information sharing, and that the press overshadows official accounts. Moreover, first-hand information is often too scattered, too thinly geotagged, and too late to be reliably used during emergency situations.

International audience; Mountains are highly sensitive to climate change. Their elevated areas provide essential ecosystem services both for the surrounding mountainous regions and particularly for adjacent lowlands. Impacts of a warmer climate affect these services and have negative consequences on the supply of water, on biodiversity and on protection from natural hazards. Mountain social-ecological systems are affected by these changes, which also influence communities' risk perception and responses to changing climate conditions. Therefore, to understand individual and societal responses to climate change in mountain areas, aspects and drivers of risk perception need to be scrutinised. This article presents the findings of a literature review of recent English language publications on risk perception in connection to climate change and related natural hazards in mountain regions worldwide. Studies were selected from recorded entries in JSTOR, Science Direct, Scopus and Web of Science covering the period 2000-2019 and analysed in two steps (structured exploratory analysis, n=249 and in-depth analysis, n=72) with respect to the studies' research question, methodology, geographical scope and risk perception drivers. The review reveals that socio-demographic factors, like gender, age and personal experiences, have a crucial impact on individual risk perception. Some of the less tangible but nevertheless decisive factors are important in mountain regions such as place attachment and socio-cultural practices. In conclusion, there is however little information in the literature which addresses the specific situation of risk perception in mountain areas and its influence on communities' responses to environmental changes. Further, we observed a strong gap concerning the integration of indigenous knowledge in risk perception research. Many studies overlook or oversimplify local knowledge and the cultural dimensions of risk perception. Based on these results, the paper identifies several gaps in research and knowledge which may influence the design of climate risk management strategies as well as on their successful implementation.

À la suite du décès de George Floyd à Minneapolis, en mai 2020, de puissantes manifestations sont organisées dans plusieurs centaines de villes des États-Unis - parfois accompagnées d'émeutes - puis, dans une moindre mesure, en Europe. Elles ont remis au coeur du débat public la question du racisme et des discriminations envers certains groupes socio-ethniques, en particulier les Noirs américains. La pesanteur des symboles historiques de l'oppression est telle que plusieurs statues d'hommes blancs, honorant des figures de la Guerre de Sécession ou des élus connus pour leur soutien à la ségrégation raciale, sont démantelées. En 2015 déjà, un mouvement souhaitant enlever la statue de Cecil Rhodes de l'Université du Cap, en Afrique du Sud, avait initié une vague de contestation de l'héritage commémoratif lié à la colonisation et à l'esclavage #Rhodesmustfall (Rhodes doit tomber) qui toucha aussi les universités américaines. Cela, alors que seuls de rares monuments honorent des personnalités afro-américaines aux États-Unis. Parmi eux, le mémorial Martin Luther King Jr., situé sur le National Mall dans la capitale fédérale, Washington, District of Columbia (DC). Ce mémorial comprend une statue entourée d'allocutions de cette figure du mouvement des droits civiques des années 1960. La localisation excentrée de ce mémorial récent, premier monument à honorer une personnalité afro-américaine sur le National Mall, interpelle d'autant plus que les citations retenues présentent une vision du monde qui articule luttes locales et globales.

One of the key challenges in risk, vulnerability and resilience is how to address the role of risk perceptions and how perceptions influence behaviour. A central question is why people still fail to act in an adaptive manner to reduce future losses, even when there are ever richer riskinformation provided by several communication channels (e.g. websites, social media, mobile applications, television, and print news). The current fragmentation of the field makes it an uphill battle to cross-validate the results of the current collection of independent case studies. This, in turn, hinders comparability and transferability across scales and contexts, and hampers giving recommendations for policy and risk management. While we obviously cannot all run the very same questionnaire or focus groups because we have different research interests, our ability to work together and build cumulative knowledge could be significantly improved by having: (1) a common list of minimal requirements to compare studies and surveys, (2) shared criteria to address context-specific aspects of countries and regions, (3) a selection of survey questions or themes allowing for comparability and long-term monitoring. Following the First European Conference on Risk Perception, Behaviour, Management and Response , the aim of the Risk Perception & Behaviour Survey of Surveyors (SoS) was to provide answers to move towards this direction.

A common assertion in discussions of flooding is that risk perception is critical and is linked to risk-mitigating behavior. Furthermore, many assert that the adverse effects of floods could be reduced by changes in risk communication, thereby influencing risk perception to foster mitigating behavior. We argue that these assertions are based on quite questionable underlying assumptions: That stakeholders are generally aware of flood risk, that they have the capacity to engage in disaster risk reduction, and that their actions can be effective. The belief in and policies influenced by these three questionable assertions support, in turn, policies that shift responsibility for flood risk reduction onto individuals and homeowners, without regard for social and spatial justice issues. In contrast, we argue that context matters to understanding the complexity of the relation between flood risk perception and behavior, local power relations, and other constraints and opportunities that affect stakeholders. While the academic community has long played a pivotal role in supporting practical flood risk management, future research should take a more critical perspective on the underlying assumptions and focus on improving coordination across theories, methods, and variables, fostering comparative studies across disciplines, contexts, and scales. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Science of Water > Water Extremes.

International audience; We would like to thank the CDC colleagues for their Commentary in what constitutes the first comment on a paper published in the Annals in decades. We view critique as a strength of scientific exploration. The Commentary concludes with as statement agreeing with the findings and conclusions of our paper: “we recognize CDC SVI may not identify the most vulnerable populations in all applications and has not done so in the Rufat et al. study (…) we agree with the authors.”

International audience; Social vulnerability models are becoming increasingly important for hazard mitigation and recovery planning, but it remains unclear how well they explain disaster outcomes. Most studies using indicators and indexes employ them to either describe vulnerability patterns or compare newly devised measures to existing ones. The focus of this article is construct validation, in which we investigate the empirical validity of a range of models of social vulnerability using outcomes from Hurricane Sandy. Using spatial regression, relative measures of assistance applicants, affected renters, housing damage, and property loss were regressed on four social vulnerability models and their constituent pillars while controlling for flood exposure. The indexes best explained housing assistance applicants, whereas they poorly explained property loss. At the pillar level, themes related to access and functional needs, age, transportation, and housing were the most explanatory. Overall, social vulnerability models with weighted and profile configurations demonstrated higher construct validity than the prevailing social vulnerability indexes. The findings highlight the need to expand the number and breadth of empirical validation studies to better understand relationships among social vulnerability models and disaster outcomes.

International audience; Space, place and their inhabitants are now subjected to a whole range of experimentations. There is however a surprising paradox: On one hand, the specificity of social sciences would be that “fieldwork” is supposed to have replaced “experiments”; on the other hand, funding requests, papers and dissertations increasingly emphasise their “experimental” scope. So is it just a matter of ease of language? Or does institutional and funding pressure force us to trump up the ways to present research and innovation? Politicians promote experimentation in order to don a scientific aura, but are we not running the risk of making it an end in itself? Or is this paradox the symptom of a new horizon?; Les territoires et leurs habitants sont l’objet de toute une palette d’expérimentations. Mais il y a un curieux paradoxe : d’un côté, la particularité des sciences sociales serait que le « terrain » y aurait remplacé « l’expérimentation » ; d’un autre, les demandes de financement, articles et thèses insistent de plus en plus sur leur caractère « expérimental ». Alors, s’agit-il d’une facilité de langage ? La pression des institutions et des financements nous impose-t-elle une surenchère sur la façon de présenter la recherche et l’innovation ? La promotion de l’expérimentation par le politique cherche aussi à capter un aura scientifique, mais ne prend-t-on pas le risque d’en faire une fin en soi ? Ou bien ce paradoxe est-il le symptôme d’un nouvel horizon ?

The European conference in March 2019 in Paris and Cergy, France, has gathered 46 researchers, experts and practitioners from 15 different countries (Algeria, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom) and 4 international organisations (European Union, OECD, UNESCO, United Nations University) for 7 panels, 3 workshops and a concluding boat-trip on the River Seine. The panels crossed disciplines (complexity science, economics, engineering, geography, history, life science, psychology, sociology, among others), including fields from all the Disaster Risk Reduction cycle phases (from early warning to insurance through perception, vulnerability, behaviour, management, resilience, etc.), and using diverse case studies to build a panoramic European view of the on-going research and practice. The workshops deepened debates and brought out the critical issues, further research needs, emerging themes to consider, and resulted in recommendations.