Disaster-risk communication, perceptions and relocation decisions of rural residents in a multi-disaster environment: Evidence from Sichuan, China

Abstract

Existing studies on disaster-risk management from the humanistic perspective have focused on disaster-risk perception as the starting point and ignored the important role of risk communication in shaping individual risk perception and changing behavioural responses. Taking Sichuan Province―a typical disaster-prone province in China―as an example and selecting rural residents in mountainous areas threatened by multiple disasters as interviewees, this study measured the characteristics of interviewees’ disaster-risk communication in the four dimensions of content preference, channel selection, communication frequency and communication form, and appraised the levels of their disaster-risk perceptions in the four dimensions of possibility, threat, self-efficacy and response efficacy. Additionally, econometric models were used to explore the chain of disaster-risk communication, perceptions and relocation decisions in different scenarios in the context of multiple disasters. The results revealed two main findings. (1) In the scenario where social relations promoted the relocation decision, interviewees derived their relocation decisions by two action paths: disaster-risk communication indirectly influenced relocation decisions through risk perception and disaster-risk communication directly influenced relocation decisions. For the indirect action path, the disaster-risk communication of interviewees had a significant impact on their risk perceptions, and self-efficacy and response efficacy played effective roles in their relocation decisions. For the direct action path, some channels of access to information and indicators of the communication form were significantly correlated with the relocation decision. (2) In the relocation-decision scenario promoted by the government, interviewees derived their relocation decision only by their disaster-risk communication. In risk communication, some channels of access to information and the communication forms of residents were significantly correlated with their relocation decisions, while the role of disaster-risk perceptions was ineffective.