Behav. Public Policy https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2019.31 (2019)

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, more households will be exposed to flood risks. Despite the high costs of recovering from flooding, many people do not purchase flood insurance, and are thus unprotected. This is consistent with a general tendency to neglect low-probability risks when making decisions.

Jacob Bradt from Harvard University, USA, tests whether behavioural science principles could be leveraged to design an effective intervention that would increase consumer demand for flood insurance. He found that participants who read a description of US coastal flooding projections due to climate change, plus a description of damages from salient tropical cyclones that recently affected the United States, and saw images of coastal flooding were willing to pay about US$21 per month more for flood insurance than participants receiving a brief training designed to aid in the interpretation of risk probabilities. These results suggest that information that elicits an affective response and prompts consideration of relevant recent events can nudge respondents toward more risk-aware adaptation decisions.