Location choice behavior adapting to flood and cyclone hazards

With the increasing impacts resulting from natural disasters, many people have been forced to move homes or jobs. The behavioral understanding of these movements is essential for decision makers. The main purposes of this paper are to investigate people's residence and job location change choice behavior and look into the behavioral differences between coastal and inland people under flood and cyclone events. Based on an orthogonal test survey design, questionnaire data were collected from 14 coastal and inland cities of Bangladesh. A cross nested logit model structure is proposed to address the research purposes. Results of this study indicate that more than 80% of the respondents would be likely to make changes, and people's behavioral responses are statistically different between inland and coastal observations. Flood/cyclone intensity, years lived at location, previous recovery experiences, age, and road connections are significant factors influencing people's location change choices, but factors are different depending on types of disasters and locations. Road connections to safe places are essentially important influencing people's location change behavior under cyclone conditions. If flood impacts become more serious, the inland people are likely to change job locations followed by residence locations, people with less land and less years lived at location are encouraged to move to safe places, and old people living in coastal cities should be protected in priority. Results of this work add to further understanding of people's choice behavior, and have implications for governments adapting to flood and cyclone events especially in developing and seriously affected countries.