1,721,045 research outputs found
Setting descriptive norm nudges to promote demand for insurance against increasing climate change risk
No full textNatural disaster losses are projected to increase worldwide, in part due to climate change. As well as offering financial protection against the impacts of climate change, insurers can promote behavioural change by stimulating individuals’ preparedness choices. Norm nudges aim to improve preparedness for risks through information provision that appeals to social norms. Based on data collected in an online experiment among homeowners, we tested for the influence on flood insurance demand of providing individuals with a norm nudge about the flood insurance purchase decisions of their neighbours. Potential moderators of the effectiveness of this norm nudge were examined, such as whether the norm is consistent with homeowners’ prior beliefs as well as whether homeowners trust insurance agents, who are used as the messenger of the norm. Based on this investigation, we suggest recommendations for policies that aim to improve preparedness against increasing losses related to climate change.</p
Social vulnerability in cost-benefit analysis for flood risk management
Full text linkTraditional cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) of flood risk reduction measures usually ignore distributions of damages over populations, which disadvantages the poor. Instead, a CBA based on social welfare includes individual social vulnerability through relative impacts on consumption. If vulnerabilities are high, floods are catastrophic and cause poverty, migration or indirect deaths, and risk reductions have high social welfare values. For non-catastrophic risks, social welfare values of risks are relatively higher for vulnerable low-income households. We present a framework to integrate social vulnerability into CBAs, and show how financial protection reduces social flood vulnerability and provides welfare benefits. A case study illustrates that traditional CBAs underestimate the social welfare value of flood risk reduction measures, up to a factor of 30. Data on financial protection is however scarce, which hampers estimation of the social welfare value in practice. A solution is to increase financial protection of individuals, in addition to offering physical flood protection.</p
The Assessment of Impacts and Risks of Climate Change on Agriculture (AIRCCA) model:a tool for the rapid global risk assessment for crop yields at a spatially explicit scale
Full text linkA main channel through which climate change is expected to affect the economy is the agricultural sector. Large spatial variability in these impacts and high levels of uncertainty in climate change projections create methodological challenges for assessing the consequences this sector could face. Crop emulators based on econometric fixed-effects models that can closely reproduce biophysical models are estimated. With these reduced form crop emulators, we develop AIRCCA, a user-friendly software for the assessment of impacts and risks of climate change on agriculture, that allows stakeholders to make a rapid global assessment of the effects of climate change on maize, wheat and rice yields. AIRCCA produces spatially explicit probabilistic impact scenarios and user-defined risk metrics for the main four Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) emissions scenarios.</p
Drivers and dimensions of flood risk perceptions: Revealing an implicit selection bias and lessons for communication policies
Full text linkFlood damages have increased in many regions around the world, and they are expected to continue to rise in the future due to climate change. To reverse this trend, awareness of flood risk among the population is required to support flood risk management policies and improve flood preparedness. However, empirical studies on the drivers of flood risk perceptions conducted thus far have reported mixed and contradictory results. The aim of this study is to provide insights into the factors that influence perceptions of various dimensions of flood risk to draw lessons to guide flood risk communication strategies. We test a variety of hypotheses of possible factors of influence on flood risk perceptions that are motivated by theoretical concepts and previous empirical studies, whilst also controlling for socio-demographic variables. A representative sample of 2,976 residents answered our survey assessing the role that past flood experiences and risk communication play in shaping flood risk perceptions. Besides exploring flood risk perceptions more robustly, this large sample also facilitates the systematic study of ‘don't know’ answers, which are often dismissed as missing data in many studies. Rather in this study we analyze what ‘don't know’ answers reflect in terms of knowledge about particular dimensions of flood risk. The study finds that older people, as well as those who have higher levels of income and education, are significantly more likely to express their flood risk perceptions, respondents who are unable to answer the questions on flood risk perceptions face a lower flood risk, report to have been living in their neighbourhood for a shorter period of time and have less first-hand flood experience. Previous studies might thus be biased by an implicit selection effect. Finally, we show that findings are highly dependent on other explicit choices made by researchers, including the apparently self-fulfilling impact of selecting one explanatory framework over another. New insights emerge from the role that information campaigns and social vulnerability play in the ability to answer the questions. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for improving flood risk communication policies, specifically increasing the frequency of communication, ensuring that campaigns are focused in terms of the content they provide and the subgroups of the population they target.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The safe development paradox: An agent-based model for flood risk under climate change in the European Union
Full text linkWith increasing flood risk due to climate change and socioeconomic trends, governments are under pressure to continue implementing flood protection measures, such as dikes, to reduce flood risk. However, research suggests that a sole focus on government-funded flood protection leads to an adverse increase in exposure as people and economic activities tend to concentrate in protected areas. Moreover, governmental flood protection can reduce the incentive for autonomous adaptation by local households, which paradoxically results in more severe consequences if an extreme flood event occurs. This phenomenon is often referred to as the ‘safe development paradox’ or ‘levee effect’ and is generally not accounted for in existing flood risk models used to assess developments in future flood risk under climate change. In this study we assess the impact of extreme flood events for the European Union using a large-scale agent-based model (ABM). We quantify how the safe development paradox affects (1) population growth and the increase in exposed property values, (2) the reduction in investments to flood-proof buildings as public protection increases, and (3) the increase in potential damage should a flood occur. For this analysis, we apply an ABM that integrates the dynamic behaviour of governments and residents into a large-scale flood risk assessment framework, in which we include estimates of changing population growth. We find that the impact of extreme flood events increases considerably when governments provide high protection levels, especially in large metropolitan areas. Moreover, we demonstrate how policy that stimulates the flood-proofing of buildings can largely counteract the effects of the safe development paradox
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Flood insurance demand and probability weighting: The influences of regret, worry, locus of control and the threshold of concern heuristic
Full text linkLow-lying densely populated areas can be susceptible to flooding due to extreme river discharges. Insurance may be used to spread flood risk and reduce potential material damages. However, homeowners often purchase insufficient amounts of insurance against natural hazard risks like flooding, which may be due to the way they process probabilities. A common finding from (Cumulative) Prospect Theory is that individuals over-weight low probabilities and under-weight moderate to high probabilities in making decisions under risk. However, very low probabilities typical of flood risks are either significantly over-weighted or neglected altogether. This study aims to examine factors related to flood insurance demand regarding emotions specific to risk, like immediate and anticipated emotions, the threshold level of concern as well as personality traits, like locus of control. In addition, we compare results under real experiment incentives to hypothetical ones with high loss outcomes. Based on data collected from 1041 homeowners in the Netherlands, we find that: an internal locus of control and anticipated regret about potentially uninsured flood losses is related to higher flood insurance demand. The use of the threshold of concern model is related to more probability under-weighting/less probability over-weighting when probabilities of flooding are low. Several policies are suggested to overcome psychological factors related to low demand for flood insurance to improve future flood preparations
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