Simulating the dynamics of individual adaptation to floods

Abstract

Individual adaptation measures are an important tool for households to reduce the negative consequences of floods. Although people's motivations to adopt such measures are widely studied in the literature, the diffusion of adaptations within a given population is less well described. In this paper, we build a dynamic agent based model which simulates the adoption of individual adaptation measures and enables evaluation of the efficiency of different communication policies. We run our model using an original dataset, based on a survey in France. We test the importance of different parameters of our model by implementing a global sensitivity analysis. We then compare the ranking and performance of different communication policies under different model settings. We show that in all settings, targeted policies that deal with both risk and coping possibilities, perform best in supporting individual adaptation. Moreover, we show that different dynamic parameters are of particular importance, namely the delay between the motivation to act and the implementation of the measure and the time during which households stick to a given adaptation measure.