the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
04 Feb 2021
04 Feb 2021
Risk perception of local stakeholders on natural hazards: implications for theory and practice
- 1Department of Geography, Geography and Geology Faculty, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, 700505, Iaşi, Romania
- 2Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine, 33110 Udine, Italy
- 3Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, 35020, Legnaro, Italy
- 1Department of Geography, Geography and Geology Faculty, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, 700505, Iaşi, Romania
- 2Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine, 33110 Udine, Italy
- 3Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, 35020, Legnaro, Italy
Abstract. In Romania, local stakeholders' knowledge plays a decisional role in emergencies, supporting rescue officers in natural hazard events, coordinating and assisting, both physically and psychologically, the affected populations. However, despite in Iași Metropolitan area (NE of Romania), the occurrence and severity of natural hazards are increasing there is a lack of knowledge of local stakeholders to address the population toward safety actions. For this reason, 118 local stakeholders were interviewed to determine their risk awareness and preparedness capacities over a set of natural hazards to understand where the lack of knowledge, action, and trust are exacerbated the most. Results reveal substantial distinctions among stakeholders and the different threats based on their cognitive and behavioral roles in the communities. The role of responsibility and trust has been seen as important driving factors shaping their perception and preparedness. Preparedness levels were low, and, not for all, learning and preparatory actions are needed to withstand the negative occurrences of natural hazards. As their role is to refer with direct interventions in affected areas managing communication initiatives with the entire population of the community, there is the need to create stakeholders' networks, empowering local actors that could serve as a bridge between authorities' decisions and local people in order to make effective risk management plans and secure more lives and economies.
Mihai Ciprian Mărgărint et al.
Status: open (until 18 Mar 2021)
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RC1: 'Comment on nhess-2021-37', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Feb 2021
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Dear authors,
your paper - Risk perception of local stakeholders on natural hazards: implications for theory and practice - presents a great contribution to disaster studies. Only, I would recommend you to make wider discussion related to - Preparedness levels were low, and, not for all, learning and preparatory actions are needed to withstand the negative occurrences of natural hazards - adding some research from a regional perspective. I will suggest some papers - Mano, R., Kirshcenbaum, A., & Rapaport, C. (2019). Earthquake preparedness: A Social Media Fit perspective to accessing and disseminating earthquake information. International Journal of Disaster Risk Management, 1(2), 19-31. https://doi.org/10.18485/ijdrm.2019.1.2.2; PeriÄ, J., & CvetkoviÄ, V. (2019). Demographic, socio-economic and phycological perspective of risk perception from disasters caused by floods: case study Belgrade. International Journal of Disaster Risk Management, 1(2), 31-43;Öcal, A. (2019). Natural Disasters in Turkey: Social and Economic Perspective. International Journal of Disaster Risk Management, 1(1), 51-61. https://doi.org/10.18485/ijdrm.2019.1.1.3; Guo, X., & Kapucu, N. (2019). Examining Stakeholder Participation in Social Stability Risk Assessment for Mega Projects using Network Analysis. International Journal of Disaster Risk Management, 1(1), 1-31. CvetkoviÄ, V., NikoliÄ, N., NenadiÄ, R. U., Ocal, A., & ZeÄeviÄ, M. (2020). Preparedness and Preventive Behaviors for a Pandemic Disaster Caused by COVID-19 in Serbia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(11), 4124. https://doi.org/10.18485/ijdrm.2019.1.1.1 etc.
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RC2: 'Comment on nhess-2021-37', Anonymous Referee #2, 26 Feb 2021
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Dear authors, I have read and appreciated your interesting work. The paper provides a comprehensive and extensive analysis of the risk perception of local stakeholders on natural hazards. The study involved the local stakeholders of IaÈi Metropolitan area for their decisional and operative role in emergencies.
The paper is well written, and well structured.
My general comments:
The initial assumptions, expressed with the three research questions, are very important and have probably guided your research. Their explanation is too concise and unclear. If it is true that they are part of the method, since they guided you in designing the interviews, they were the starting point of your research. I suggest you to give them more emphasis also in the introduction.
You have analyzed a broad spectrum of natural hazards of different nature, frequency and severity requiring very different prevention and preparedness measures in terms of costs and operational system. The effort made is considerable but the great differences between the analyzed risks and the stakeholder institutional roles could hide a little pitfall when you compare the survey results. This matter could be more stressed in the discussion.
The method and the statistical analyses can beneficiate of some minor adjustments, a work flow diagram may help to better clarify the method.
In the results section you should expand the description of the Correspondence Analysis biplots figures (Figs: 5, 9 and 10) that, in my opinion, is too short and concise reducing the potential interest of the analysis.
In general, to increase the readability of the paper, it could be helpful to add in the text the references of the questions (Q1, Q2, etc.) when you report the percentage values of the survey results. In the supplementary material Table A2 and Table A3 have some questions that are not in Table A1.
These comments and others minor were annotated and trace in the enclosed pdf file.
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RC3: 'Comment on nhess-2021-37', Anonymous Referee #3, 04 Mar 2021
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General comments:
The authors present a case study from IaÈi, in Romania, where they explored local stakeholders’ risk perception concerning multiple natural hazards. They conducted 118 surveys with five different types of stakeholders (school heads, priests, police officers, mayors, and farmers). They found that different stakeholders show different perceptions of risk, also due to the geographical location of their community. The idea behind the paper is interesting and relevant, as often these groups work as a bridge between authorities and local communities and play a fundamental role during disasters. However, there are some concerning aspects that the authors should address before this paper can be considered for publication in NHESS. I will list them here, together with some minor/technical corrections.
Specific comments:
1) Article structure – Section 2.1-2.2-2.3 are very detailed, so much so that the reader loses sight of what the paper is about. I think it is relevant to provide information on the geomorphology, climate and natural hazards history of the area, but this can be done more concisely. Instead, I would give more space to literature on risk perception and stakeholders role in communities during disaster, which are now confined to the short introduction and should be expanded (this is the core of the paper, after all).
2) Background – The paper is about risk perception, but very little literature is presented in this regard. The authors mention that the lay public “demonstrated a low perception and readiness”, but where does this information come from? The stated aim of the paper is to “investigate stakeholders’ level of knowledge and cognitive appraisal of natural hazards in order to understand if they think and act differently from the lay public […] and understand their role during emergencies”. Yet the paper only focuses on the perception of the stakeholder, and no lay person was interviewed, making it impossible to detect any differences in perception. Second, it seems from the introduction (lines 62-75) that the role of the local stakeholders during emergencies is already known and understood.
The authors investigate perceptions of seven natural hazards but divide all the communities assayed according to only three of these hazards (floods, landslides, soil erosion). How are the other hazards distributed across the communities examined? Do they affect them all with the same frequency, intensity?
3) Data collection – The authors mention dominant, discretionary, and dormant stakeholders, but these terms are not defined, nor used anywhere else in the paper. Figure 2 would be easier to read if it were a table. It would also be good to know the % of respondents in the HUA and FUA (e.g. priest 21% of the total, of which 60% in HUA and 40% in FUA). All this info plus that in Fig.2 plus lines 253-261 can be nicely summarized in a table. Line 251 “some stakeholders inviting other members of the community (especially the mayors) into the dialogues”, do the authors mean that the mayor was invited to the interview? I think this could cause some issues as the answer of the interviewee could have been influenced by the presence of the mayor. Lines 262-272 should go in the introduction/background.
It is unclear whether the authors conducted questionnaire surveys or semi-structured interviews. It seems to me that they conducted questionnaire surveys (considering that all the questions were close-ended), as they specify in line 246. If they also conducted semi-structured interviews, they should report the questions that were asked (at least the initial ones, but the follow-up ones should be reported too), whether the interviews were recorded, how was consent acquired, whether they were transcribed, and how data from the interviews were analysed.
Table A1 in the appendix should also report the minimum and maximum value for every question asked on a scale. What does “low-high” that sometimes appear in the second column of the table mean? Are those the extremes of the scale?
Q13 asks two questions in one, this can be an issue for those respondents whose answer may change depending on the question part (reduce negative consequences of natural hazards vs it should be taken as a priority where you live)
4) Statistical analysis – The analysis of the data is rather shallow, often just a comparison of percentages. The contingency table tests results would be clearer if presented in the form of Chi-square values, rather than with Correspondence Analysis (CA) graphs. In my opinion, they are hard to read, not intuitive, and a distracted reader may even draw wrong conclusions from them. In addition, I don’t think it is an appropriate way to represent your results. Running some ordinal logistic regressions would add some depth to the analysis and would give additional insights on the role of type of stakeholder and geographical characteristics in influencing risk perception.
5) Results – The results of the statistical analysis are reported only in terms of %, and the correlations are reported through CA graphs (such as in Fig. 5-9-10). I think a much more meaningful representation of the data would be plotting the mean responses for Q2 (perceived impact) and Q4 (perceived likelihood) for each hazard by stakeholder type. This would immediately show potential differences in risk perception and it’s more intuitive to read.
6) Discussion – The discussion should go more in depth, and this would be facilitated by a deeper statistical analysis. It would also help to have the discussion structured following the three research questions/themes. No limitations of the study are discussed, even though there are quite some (e.g. sample size, not surveying any lay person, statistical analysis). The discussion does not tie the results to the literature, and it is therefore hard to generalize the results and compare them with previous (and potentially future) studies.
67 Research question – Q1 what do the authors mean with “dependency relationship between the threats of different natural hazards”?
Technical corrections:
The manuscript needs in-depth proofreading, some sentence constructs are hard to follow, and there are few typos throughout the paper (I provide some examples below, but the list is not exhaustive).
Line 23: “some stakeholders”, communities and authorities are stakeholders too, so I would use “other stakeholders”
Line 162: I think there’s a repetition in the sentence.
Line 164: it should be “is”, not “if”
Line 203: “persons” can be removed, it’s superfluous
Mihai Ciprian Mărgărint et al.
Mihai Ciprian Mărgărint et al.
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