Abstract

The flood risk prevention plan is a french zoning policy aiming at regulating land use and providing risk information in municipalities prone to flood risk. While it is one of the main flood prevention policy in France, its causal impact on risk perception and protection behavior has never been studied. This paper aims to fill this gap using two household surveys conducted in southern France. By combining the geo-location of the 616 respondents with the flood zones, we perform a regression discontinuity based on the distance to the border of the risk area. We find no effect at the border of the flood zoning policy. This result suggests that risk perception is shaped more by unformal than by official sources. It also raises concerns about its ability to incentivize residents to adopt protection measures.

Practical information