Better prepared but less resilient: the paradoxical impact of flood experience on adaptive behavior and social resilience

In natural hazards research, social resilience is becoming a topic of high scientific interest. Due to global climate change, most natural hazards are occurring more often and put individuals' mental and physical health, economic endowments, and the existence of their valued objects at risk. One way to decrease the impacts of these hazards is to increase individual's resilience. Consequently, the knowledge of the drivers behind it becomes more desirable as it is necessary to design strategies to prepare households for future hazards. The central question of the research project is if flood experience impacts adaptive behavior and self-perceived social resilience and, if so, in what ways. The applied empirical method is an ordered logistic regression model using data from a panel dataset (2020-2021), including 1750 residents (Germany, state of Saxony). Four main conclusions from the investigations can be drawn. First, more experienced individuals are statistically significantly more likely to have taken precautionary measures in the past. Second, flood experience has a statistically significant negative impact on self-perceived social resilience. Third, the impact of flood experience on the capacity to resist is not linear. Fourth, putting together these results reveals the paradox that more flood-experienced people are better prepared but feel less resilient at the same time. It can be concluded that more research is needed to obtain deeper insights into the drivers behind social resilience and that this study can be seen as a piece of the puzzle, taking flood experience as the primary target point. While this study contributes with more profound knowledge of what role experiences play in building social resilience, it connects theories from social and natural sciences. Consequently, it enriches the existing knowledge with more interdisciplinarity.