More is spent in the US on planning for earthquakes than for wildfires, even though both are dangerous to populations. So how can decisionmakers do better? A new paper aims to incorporate what we know about the psychology of risk to overcome biases and find a better way of planning for natural hazards.

Disaster planners normally use estimates equivalent to how much money could be lost when making decisions about what to spend on dangers like hurricanes, earthquakes and forest fires. But  experts from the University of Colorado say this approach fails to take into account how people view natural hazards.

Without understanding public biases in relation to different events, planners could fail to gain public support for plans to prepare for risks, and even lead to a backlash, according to the paper. Co-author Maura Knutson tells Carbon Brief that for several natural hazards in the US, loss of life and property was made worse because disaster plans hadn’t been sufficient. She says:

“We saw that the world of emergency planning lacked a human aspect. Many books have been written on human perception of common risks. However, this concept applied to natural hazards had yet to be explored and certainly had not been applied”.

Redrawing risk planning 

The researchers aimed to create a framework that allows policymakers to build human reactions to risk into disaster planning. Their work starts with the work of Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, who studied how people react to and judge everyday risks. Dr Ross Corotis, who also collaborated on the paper says:

“We looked at the social psychology literature, especially the works of Paul Slovic and his various colleagues, explaining how people perceive the costs and benefits of myriad risks they face in everyday life.  We took the most important characteristics of these perceptions and interpreted them in terms of natural hazards, seeing how these perceptions were not aligned with the actual consequence experience in the United States over a 50-year period.”

The researchers took the two most relevant factors to natural disasters from Slovic’s work – measuring how much people dread a particular risk versus how familiar they are with it. Using data from the University of Carolina’s Hazards and Vulnerability Institute, they created a framework, mapping the outcomes of 18 kinds of natural hazard by geographical region of the US using graphics.

For each hazard, there are rings displaying the total number of deaths, injuries and dollar loss over 50 years, from 1960 to 2009. As the graphic below shows, winds and storms present the biggest risk in terms of financial losses and fatalities in the US mid-Atlantic region. It shows more familiar threats like strong winds don’t carry the same fear cachet as less-familiar hazards like extreme heat.

Corotis says failure to understand human reactions to risk has created some problematic outcomes for disaster planning in the US, with resources allocated patchily, despite a great deal of risk from some events. He says:

“Flooding, hurricane and wind affect more people in the United States in a typical year than earthquakes, tornadoes and lightning. Yet the focus is on earthquakes, where we have a National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program. For wind and hurricane we have an unfunded National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program, and for flooding we depend on the National Flood Insurance Program, which was originally intended to encourage mitigation but instead has become primarily an insurance mechanism.”

Climate change 

Climate change is likely to yield more frequent weather extremes, making disaster planning even harder. As the climate changes, policymakers must deal with increased uncertainty, and risk, says Corotis.

According to the  US Climate Change Science Program, heat and drought have been increasing in the country. Meanwhile, extreme rainfall has also become more frequent and intense over the past 50 years.

Corotis explains that when creating a hazard mitigation plan, policymakers typically use the expected values of natural hazard data, based on averages of what has gone before, to make decisions. But these values create problems. Not only do they fail to represent people’s perception of risk, they may also fall short of capturing the risk of increasing extremes.

Doing it better

So what could help make policymakers more prepared for natural hazards – and the sometimes irrational responses to them? Says Corotis:

“If planners could help people understand how their perceptions of risk are not aligned with the probabilities of occurrence or the consequences in terms of fatalities, injuries and dollar loss, it may be possible to direct attention and funding to the most effective ways to reduce expected consequences.”

Knutson says the framework is designed to help disaster planners be better prepared, not just for risk, but for how people will respond to it:

“Disaster planning has improved in the last decade with regards to human perception of risk. However, it has been mostly reactionary. Natural hazards hit, the public reacts, and then we decide if our plan worked or not. Our framework is designed to take typical emergency plans and see them in light of the people we expect to follow our directions. We seek to plan for people’s reactions before the disaster strikes.”

The authors say a big missing piece of the puzzle is also educating the public. Emergency planning is much more effective when the public is fully, and realistically, aware of the dangers, explains Knutson. To expect the public to follow your emergency plan requires them to understand why it’s important, she says. “This is why our framework of understanding perception of risk in terms of familiarity and dread can be so helpful”, she adds.

As the climate changes, it’s likely society will be faced with increasing numbers of threats, challenging our ability to adapt. To begin to do so successfully, they’ll have to understand the public’s – and their own – biases. As well as spending some more on wind, storm and flood planning, perhaps.