VigiFlood: evaluating the impact of a change of perspective on flood vigilance
Carole Adam
TL;DR
VigiFlood addresses the challenge of maintaining public trust in flood risk communication amid forecasting uncertainty by placing citizens in the role of emergency communicators through a serious game. The authors build an agent-based population model that links subjective risk, trust dynamics, and evacuation decisions to forecast-driven vigilance levels, and they evaluate impact via a pre/post online questionnaire anchored in the 2018 Aude floods. Results indicate that a change of perspective can heighten orange-vigilance awareness and protective-action intentions while stabilizing trust in the face of false alarms, though user engagement and broader deployment remain ongoing challenges. The work offers a practical framework for population-level risk communication training and a data-driven tool to help forecasters anticipate public reactions to warnings.
Abstract
Emergency managers receive communication training about the importance of being 'first, right and credible', and taking into account the psychology of their audience and their particular reasoning under stress and risk. But we believe that citizens should be similarly trained about how to deal with risk communication. In particular, such messages necessarily carry a part of uncertainty since most natural risks are difficult to accurately forecast ahead of time. Yet, citizens should keep trusting the emergency communicators even after they made forecasting errors in the past. We have designed a serious game called Vigiflood, based on a real case study of flash floods hitting the South West of France in October 2018. In this game, the user changes perspective by taking the role of an emergency communicator, having to set the level of vigilance to alert the population, based on uncertain clues. Our hypothesis is that this change of perspective can improve the player's awareness and response to future flood vigilance announcements. We evaluated this game through an online survey where people were asked to answer a questionnaire about flood risk awareness and behavioural intentions before and after playing the game, in order to assess its impact.