Disaster risk reduction among households exposed to landslide hazard: a crucial role for coping appraisal?

Kewan Mertens, Liesbet Jacobs, Jan Maes, Jean Poesen, Matthieu Kervyn and Liesbet Vranken

No 265433, Working Papers from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Agricultural and Food Economics

Abstract: Natural hazards have a large impact on household livelihoods worldwide, especially in the Global South. Yet, literature on the adoption of risk reduction measures at household level remains scattered and inconclusive. This study combines geographical data with an original cross-sectional household survey to investigate the relation between individual land use plans and both exposure to and experience with a natural hazard. Regressions are used to test the protection motivation theory (PMT) and to investigate the link between intentions to plant trees to reduce landslide risk and past experiences, actual exposure, perceived threat and perceived capacity to prevent the occurrence of landslides. The results show that respondents in our study area in Uganda are well aware of landslide risk and believe trees are effective in landslide susceptibility reduction. Yet, those farmers that would benefit most from reducing landslide susceptibility by planting trees have the lowest intention to do so. A low self-efficacy among exposed farmers is proposed to explain this result. This finding has important implications for disaster risk reduction and land use policies and leads to recommendations on how governments and development agents should communicate about landslide risk.

Keywords: Institutional and Behavioral Economics; Land Economics/Use; Risk and Uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2017-11-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/265433/files/Mertens%20et%20al.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/265433/files/M ... l.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:kucawp:265433

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.265433

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Agricultural and Food Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search (aesearch@umn.edu).