Fostering Self-Protection against Impacts of Heavy Rain at the Municipal Level

Abstract

Local governments are highly relevant actors when it comes to mitigating climate change impacts such as flooding. Not only do they need to implement regulatory and infrastructural measures, but they also need to promote complementing self-protective measures at the household level. The individual motivation of municipal actors to pursue climate adaptation can be important for the implementation of such measures, obviously alongside several other factors, such as financial and administrative issues. A questionnaire survey with a non-random sample of 77 local government actors from 15 of the 16 German federal states was conducted, focusing on potential key factors concerning the motivation to implement adaptation measures against hazardous impacts of heavy rain. Additionally, the perceived effectiveness and realizability of selected municipal structural measures and of activation measures promoting self-protective behavior were collected. It can be shown that the perceived realizability of adaptation measures as well as knowledge of risk and adaptation may be key factors in the motivation to implement both activation and structural measures, while motivation and implementation are only partially related. The results imply a need for the evaluation of activation measures and a need for further research on the motivation of municipal actors to implement activation measures.