Applying risk governance principles to natural hazards and risks in mountains

Abstract

The multidisciplinarity of spatial planning leads it to address all spatially relevant issues present on a territory. Among them, the question of natural hazards and risks gained a particular attention in the last decades. Despite the permanent deepening of knowledge about natural hazards and risks, and the various strategies adopted to reduce their impact on societies, natural disasters are still causing considerable damages and taking lives. Obviously, the traditional approaches have reached their limit. The new challenges posed by natural risks create a need for a more comprehensive approach, risk governance. This framework includes risk assessment and risk management, embedded in a large risk communication environment. The place of the public in this approach has to be shifted from potential victims to active actors in the decision making processes. In addition, the general dynamic of harmonisation of policies observed in the European Union conducts to consider an harmonisation of natural risks related policies. Moreover, as many regions in Europe are facing similar risks with different strategies influenced by their respective risk cultures, sharing methods and knowledge could help reaching a higher efficiency. But the transfer of methods is hindered by the dissimilarities in risk cultures. This study addresses the perceptions and expectations of the public in risk prone areas, in an attempt to understand how far they influence risk cultures. By comparing perceptions and expectations in two sites with similar risk settings, the study aimed at pointing out the elements that shape risk cultures, and understand how they could be considered when transferring good practice examples.