Identifying and quantifying landowner perspectives on integrated flood risk management

Abstract

Understanding landowner perspectives on flood mitigation is an essential step towards minimising conflict and ensuring public support and compliance. To illuminate landowner perspectives on flood mitigation and the drivers of those perspectives, we surveyed landowners in the Deerfield River Watershed, Massachusetts (USA). Confirmatory factor analysis shows landowners differentiate between the physical and the policy pathways through which flood mitigation strategies provide protection. Multiple regression analyses indicate landowner support or opposition for each of those pathways is related both to the risks a landowner faces and to their broad worldviews. Lastly, cluster analysis indicates variation in patterns landowner of support or opposition to the physical and policy pathways through which flood mitigation provides protection. Findings point to how issues beyond flood impacts, including understandings of riverine processes, assessments of responsibility, and interpretations of the relationship between government and private property drive landowner perspectives on flood mitigation policies.