Abstract
São Vicente Island (Republic of Cape Verde) lies within the Sahelian zone and faces several natural hazards, one of which is flash flooding. With the purpose of understanding what factors determine flash flood risk perception, a questionnaire entitled Flash Flood Hazard Perception in Cape Verde was applied to 199 subjects. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to identify the primary factors associated with the perception of flash flood risk. Differences between different groups under the same impact factor were also compared. The results indicated that certain socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents (gender, level of education, and type of housing) and prior experience correlated with flash flood risk perception. The study also shows statistical differences between the groups. In general, males and the respondents with a high level of education, homeowners, and people with prior experience have better perception of the flash flood risk. These findings can help decision makers to improve effective flash flood risk communication policies and flood risk reduction strategies.
Highlights
The number of disasters related to natural hazards and their impact has significantly increased in recent decades [1,2,3]
Even though flash floods were mainly studied in the context of physical science in the last century, in 1942, in a seminar about the human reaction to a flash flood crisis scenario (“Human Adjustment to Flood”) White acknowledged the important value of human perception in the mitigation process, stressing the human factor as determinant in the risk perception (RP) [5] and risk communication [6]
This study aims to determine what factors influence flash flood risk perception in Mindelo, São Vicente, in the archipelago of Cape Verde, where little-to-nothing is known about public perception of the risk posed by flash floods
Summary
The number of disasters related to natural hazards and their impact has significantly increased in recent decades [1,2,3]. The resulting economic and social costs, especially those related to losses/damages and the recovery/reconstruction processes are certainly substantial. Flood hazards in particular cost nearly 20,000 lives and affect 20 million people worldwide every year, mostly because of the resulting homelessness [4]. According to Wachinger et al (2013) [7] risk perception is the process of collecting, selecting, and interpreting signals about the uncertain impacts of events and involves multiple influencing factors in a very complex framework [8,9,10,11,12]. Risk perception depends on an individual’s subjective judgement and evaluation of a specific risk [13,14,15] which can be perceived as potentially dangerous by one person, whilst it may be considered safe by another person
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