Flood risks and climate change beliefs

Understanding citizen’s climate change risk perceptions is important for designing proactive climate adaptation policies. The extent to which such perceptions are shaped by increasing flood risks is still unclear and controversial. Although research on this topic has proliferated recently, existing studies mostly focus on developed countries with limited geographical coverage. The local foci of these studies often lead to inconsistent conclusions and are hard to generalise, especially to developing regions. This research agenda has faced inferential challenges, due to lack of global-scale climate risk perceptions data and robust estimates of historical flood risks. Leveraging the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll data and the research team’s prior research endeavours on global flood risk assessment, this project will unite a diverse team of international collaborators with NUS to develop novel data-driven causal inferences to provide a global picture on the linkages between actual and perceived flood risk and individual climate change risk perceptions.

1. Are individuals living in flood prone regions more concerned about climate change?
2. To what extent do people’s perceived flood risk explain their climate change attitudes relative to expert’s estimated risk of historical flooding events, and what are the relative gaps across nations?