Enhancing Community Resilience to Ice-Jam Floods: Insights from Socioeconomic and Psychological Factors in Fort McMurray, Canada

Ice-jam floods present a real risk for riverine communities in cold climate regions through their often-sudden but always potentially destructive nature. This fact makes the analysis of the driving factors for residents in adopting measures against ice-jam flood hazards in the city of Fort McMurray, Canada, very relevant. By employing a structured survey that integrates the Protection Motivation Theory and the Transtheoretical Model, we identify self-efficacy, threat experience appraisal, and perceived costs as some of the key drivers influencing protective behaviors. The results also call for stage-specific, tailored interventions in concert with variation in readiness to act. Our findings clearly indicate that to realize the hoped-for increase in the adoption rate, policy approaches have to be directed to address the cost barrier, develop self-efficacy through appropriate communication strategies, and consider the peculiarities of various community groups, such as renters and transient populations. By proposing public policies, this work demonstrates how these strategies can be utilized as inputs for quantitative modeling approaches, such as agent-based modeling, to evaluate their impact on community-wide flood risk management. This research underlines the importance of integrating behavioral insights with advanced quantitative modeling tools in designing and implementing better flood risk management strategies that promote more resilient communities.