Actual vis-Ã -vis perceived risk of flood prone urban communities in Pakistan

Urban flooding has been an alarming issue over the past years in Asia and other countries. Pakistan has been experiencing such flooding with associated damages regularly. Understanding the degree of vulnerability and risk are essential to work out risk reduction measures. It is equally important to measure the risk perception vis-à-vis actual risk for successful implementation of preparedness initiatives. The main purpose of this paper is to understand the variation as well as the relationship between actual and perceived risk. Three cities (Rawalpindi, Sialkot and Muzaffargarh) with different population size situated in high risk flood zones of Pakistan were selected for empirical investigation. Household survey was conducted in three urban communities highly impacted by flood for actual and perceived risk assessments with well-defined indicators. Results revealed that due to poor socioeconomic conditions of households living in flood prone community of metropolitan city, they were more vulnerable as compared to other cities. In three cities, about 14% households live at high risk against 10% households with high-perceived risk. Significantly differential risks exist among the cities. Similar results have been observed in terms of perceived risk. Comparative analyses have revealed that both actual and perceived risk levels are significantly different among the cities but reflect a positive correlation in all three cities. This implies that the perceived risk increases with respect to actual risk. In the absence of hard data for actual risk assessment, perceived risk may be a good substitute for working out risk reduction measures.