The SC3 lab is running a longitudinal survey in four countries studying the drivers of individual adaptation to floods. The initial survey reveals differences in the effects of factors motivating action. For those of you who work with primary survey data let’s get in touch and explore the synergies of uniting fragmented knowledge! 

Understanding the factors driving individual adaptation to flooding is important for assessing risk, motivating action, and fostering societal resilience. While there are several methods to choose from, surveys have become a popular mechanism from which to gather data on the different components that influence household level protection motivation. Those of us who study household level adaptation often are able to make strides running a single survey in a country or two at a time. However, the disjointed nature of data collection and current research has left unanswered questions and at times, even contradicting results. 

As part of a European Research Council grant, the SC3 lab, led by Professor Tatiana Filatova, is running a large scale longitudinal survey among households in coastal, urban areas in the United States, China, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. Data from the four countries has allowed us to preform comparative analysis that explores differences in adaptation motivation across countries (publications forthcoming – teaser below with six variables). Prior work has noted that differences can be partially explained by culture, but also depend on institutional, economic, and experiential circumstances. We are interested in continuing this research objective in collaboration with the broader scientific community. 

With this blog, we would like to send out a call to the international community of scholars working with surveys eliciting the social and behavioral factors, driving individual households’ decisions in face of floods. We are interested in combing our recourses and data with yours. In working together, we have a unique opportunity to investigate an otherwise unanswerable question:  

How do the factors commonly used to explain private flood adaptation differ across countries and are there any patterns in their variation?

If you have run a survey in the last 15 years that investigates individual adaptation motivation and are open to working with us on comparing findings in our datasets across countries (or over time in the same country) we want to hear from you! Our idea is to compile comparable survey data on private climate adaptation/private flood mitigation behavior from as many unique countries as possible. 

With this project we guarantee both data privacy and that your data will only be used in this cross-country and/or over time comparison project. We understand many of you have unique time constraints and thus, aside from your data contribution you can determine your own involvement to the degree you’d like. We believe that with the uniqueness of the combined data-set we can jointly pursue a scientific publication in a high impact journal. Ideally this endeavor will provide insights for the design of policies aimed at climate change adaptation and improve socio-economic resilience against flooding.

For more information on our work and who we are please check out our website: http://www.sc3.center/ 

If you have any questions or would like to express your interest, please send me, Brayton Noll, an email at b.l.noll@utwente.nl. Once we have garnered sufficient interest to move the project forward, I will email out a short google survey to determine the commonalities across our data sets and we can move forward from there. I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you!