Understanding and Coping with the Increasing Risk of Flood Disaster in Malaysia: Stakeholders’ Perspective as Decision-Makers

Abstract

Over the years, the economic development of Malaysia has been progressing as the country is moving forward to achieve its aspiration to become a developed country by the year 2020. This condition requires rapid developments to take place in all types of the geographical profile which include hazardous environments such as risky prone areas as a result of infrastructure developments. Hence, as populations begin to be concentrated in these disaster-prone areas, more and more people are subjected to disaster risks and the damaging impacts of a disaster such as flood, landslide, earthquake, etc. Therefore, it is vital to conduct studies on how human population perceives disaster risks that have great influences on their decision-making processes in managing disaster events. Various studies to date have been valuable in providing a basis on how stakeholders such as local communities perceived disaster risks, but most of them normally focused on post-disaster settings. The main objective of this chapter is to explore the nature of the informed decision-making processes with the consideration of flood risks based on the applicability of a disaster management model from the perspective of risk enablers and risk results. The chapter provides a research framework for understanding flood risk for disaster management with the incorporation of flood risk enablers through flood risk identification process and flood risk results through flood risk assessment to evaluate the understanding and perception of stakeholders towards various factors that influenced the decision-making of disaster management. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, a quantitative approach was used to analyse risk enablers and risk results where correlation analysis was also carried out to investigate causal relations between the flood risk enablers and flood risk results of disaster management.