Impact of cry wolf effects on social preparedness and the efficiency of flood early warning systems

[摘要] To improve the efficiency of flood early warning systems (FEWS), it isimportant to understand the interactions between natural and social systems.The high level of trust in authorities and experts is necessary to improvethe likeliness of individuals to take preparedness actions responding towarnings. Despite many efforts to develop the dynamic model of human andwater in socio-hydrology, no socio-hydrological models explicitly simulatesocial collective trust in FEWS. Here, we develop the stylized model tosimulate the interactions of flood, social collective memory, socialcollective trust in FEWS, and preparedness actions responding to warnings byextending the existing socio-hydrological model. We realistically simulatethe cry wolf effect in which many false alarms undermine the credibility ofthe early warning systems and make it difficult to induce preparednessactions. We found that (1) considering the dynamics of social collective trust inFEWS is more important in the technological society with infrequent floodevents than in the green society with frequent flood events; and (2) as thenatural scientific skill to predict flood events is improved, the efficiencyof FEWS gets more sensitive to the behavior of social collective trust, sothat forecasters need to determine their warning threshold by consideringthe social aspects.

[学科分类] 妇产科学