Home as haven? Why place attachment matters for perceptions of risk

Exposed to changing demographic pressures and extreme climatic events, coastal areas offer unique opportunities to study the complexity of adaptation to global changes and the diversity of responses to risk. How populations and individuals act in the face of risk varies widely: rationalist and economic based understandings that focus on information dissemination have proved inadequate in fully understanding why people do or don't perceive and act on risks. Here we use place attachment as a lens through which to understand perceptions of flood hazard at the household scale. We suggest a way of understanding risk that focuses on the different types of meanings people attach to local places and test the relationship between place attachment and risk perception. Our results from an extensive household survey (n=750) in coastal regions in the Languedoc - France, Garden Route - South Africa and in Cornwall- England demonstrate how processes of mobility shape configurations of place attachments, and what this means for social differentiation of risk. We find that groups within the population that hold different types of place attachment differ in their perceptions of the causes and likelihood of flood events. Our analysis shows that using place attachment theory and methods deepens our understanding of the socio-cognitive processes that underpin how humans respond to environmental uncertainty, especially place related risk. In particular our findings are useful for policy makers in communicating flood risk and in understanding why people may choose not to protect themselves from potential flood events. (Texte intégral)