Floodplain Residents' Preferences for Non-Structural Flood Alleviation Measures in the Red River Basin, Manitoba, Canada

Abstract

Based on the assumption that there is a general gap in information about social aspects of flood/floodplain management, the authors undertook several surveys on rural and urban residents' preferences for selected non-structural flood alleviation measures in the Red River basin, following the 1997 flood of the century. In addition to regular multiple choice and preference scaling questions, each survey contained a discrete choice experiment (a stated preference approach) which allows explicit modeling of tradeoffs. For this purpose, respondents were shown a set of choice cards displaying varied profiles of hypothetical flood/floodplain management policies and each of the respondents was asked to select the most preferred profile from a set. The survey on emergency flood evacuation indicated that in their preferences for evacuation procedures, residents were sensitive to the level of risk present. The majority of the residents preferred voluntary evacuation at the 50 percent risk of hazardous flooding, but had no objection to mandatory evacuation at a 99 percent level of risk. The choice experiment was less successful in modeling preferences for floodproofing policies. In that case, the majority of respondents consistently preferred the option of floodproofing their homesteads, irrespective of the incentives that other policy options had provided. Some of the additional survey questions suggested that the absence of a typical tradeoff behavior might have been due to the fact that a government policy on floodproofing had already been announced. The latter might have unduly influenced the responses to the hypothetical scenarios. We conclude the paper by suggesting that social science research can make significant contributions to the management and policy design of non-structural flood alleviation measures, especially when investigating management options and outcomes in a tradeoff context.