Addressing the social vulnerability gap in disaster risk perception

While practitioners are often prompt to call for more risk communication campaigns, the impacts of disadvantage and vulnerability are often overlooked. This is related to social vulnerability frameworks that often fail to explicitly address risk perception, whereas risk perception theories usually overlook social vulnerability. The resulting social vulnerability research gap might be self-reinforcing: empirical studies will find it difficult to derive vulnerability as relevant for perception from the current theories, while the fragmented empirical evidence thus far offers little support to connect risk perception theories and social vulnerability frameworks. This study addresses this gap by exploring the links between social vulnerability and risk perception, first in the most commonly used theoretical frameworks – including adaptive behaviour, then with original empirical data from France after a series of floods (n = 5,000). The novelty is to compare the explanatory power of social vulnerability with two common explanations of risk perception: previous hazard experience and risk information. The models implementing social vulnerability are overall explaining the larger effects. Furthermore, when taking social vulnerability into account, experience remains a robust explanation, whereas information and campaigns often lose their significance. One key implication is that policies aimed at reducing social vulnerability might be more effective than risk communication campaigns to increase awareness and preparedness. This underlines the necessity to systematically investigate the impacts of social vulnerability on risk perception in a larger variety of case studies, disaster stages, and hazard types.