Modelling bottom-up behavioral dynamics for community-based adaptive flood risk management

Abstract

This study noticed the transfer of attention from top-down flood risk management (FRM) to bottom-up approaches such as adaptive flood risk management (AFRM), which still faces barriers in property rights, responsibilities, knowledge, and behaviours across stakeholders. Moreover, collaboration efforts to overcome AFRM barriers are more paid to stakeholder participation processes than to the potential of each stakeholder, thus lacking a role-oriented view in managing behaviour-driven multi-participant AFRM systems. This study focuses on the role of stakeholders in AFRM and how to systematically present their roles at a community scale. First, a three-level framework of adaptation behaviours for public participation in AFRM is established with a collaborative perspective. Second, research on the driving factors of adaptation behaviours at each level is reviewed. Finally, a hybrid method of agent-based modelling and system dynamics is used to construct a multi-participant AFRM system and present the behavioural dynamics. This study makes contributions to knowledge with: First, a structured view of the public’s role in AFRM in a three-level framework. Second, a research map that shows the driving factors of each level of adaptation behaviours. Finally, a decision support tool that presents rich scenarios for decision-makers to explore behavioural dynamics and solutions. However, this study has shortcomings in terms of the lack of verification and localization of the model, lack of internal correlations of mechanisms, and limited scale of the exploration. This study hopes to improve the model in the future, expand it to larger-scale issues with the community-based model as a packable unit, and apply the ideas and routines in this thesis to broader issues.

Thesis is embargoed until 31 July 2028.

Date of Award	Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Queen's University & China Scholarship Council & Henry Lester Trust Limited, The
Supervisor	Greg Keeffe (Supervisor) & Thomas Jefferies (Supervisor)