Resumen

LEY GARCIA, Judith. Risk Perception and Fear of Urban Hazard. Invest. Geog [online]. 2020, n.103, e60087.  Epub 09-Mar-2021. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.60087.

Identifying environmental hazards is the first step in risk assessment to define safety or mitigation actions. However, while experts make a diagnosis based on quantitative risk assessment, ordinary people use the information from the physical and communication environment to assess their own safety status. This leads to biases between expert and everyday visions of risk, which can increase it physically when, in the face of any event, people are either unprepared or show exaggerated responses because of the socially attenuated or magnified perception of risk, respectively. Hence the importance of risk perception in disaster prevention.

Recent studies on the subject indicate that emotions play a central role in how ordinary people make judgments about their safety. These studies report that fear or alarm is the main driver of public perception and acceptance or rejection of risk within a wide range of hazards.

Considering the above, this article explores the effect of fear on the social identification and assessment of urban hazards, and its relationship with other variables that influence the perception of risk. We aimed to answer the following question: Do people identify the potential hazards in their environment or consider them as severe because they fear them? This question involves exploring the influence of fear on the social identification of hazards and its weight on the extent of hazard assigned by subjects.

To this end, we conducted a survey called Local Risk Perception: Mexicali City, applied to a random sample of 390 households in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. From this, we used data regarding six variables that record, for a list of 36 hazards: Whether the inhabitants identify them in the area where they live; the level of fear and the degree of hazard assigned; whether they have experienced any direct damages, whether they recall recent events related to them, and whether they perceive an increase in the severity of the phenomenon.

Besides, regarding the hazards on the list, we included two objective variables that record expert assessment: the level of exposure and the urban hazard, both calculated from the information provided by the Atlas of Risks for Mexicali. Finally, Pearson's correlation coefficients were calculated for all possible pairs of the eight variables involved.

Among the key findings, the correlation analysis showed that the identification of the hazards in the area, the experience of damages, and the memories of recent events showed the strongest relationship of all the variables involved, evidencing the weight of direct experience of adverse effects on people's judgment on the local hazards.

In addition, the statistical test indicated that fear is not significantly related to all the variables involved and is poorly related to most of them, revealing that fear marginally influences or is affected by the variables considered in this study.

The above support that people can identify the hazards in the local environment because they have witnessed their presence on the site or have been directly affected by them, rather than because they are afraid.

Our findings are contrary to the remarks in the literature on the influence of fear on risk assessment. According to our study, this negative emotion is insufficient to explain the fact that the inhabitants of Mexicali identify the presence of particular hazards in their neighborhood or the hazard level assigned to them, despite having suffered direct damages or recalling any past event.

Instead, we found that direct experience regarding damages and losses is a major source of information in the learning and assessing the local hazards. Hence, from a risk perception perspective, it is necessary to approach the mitigation of urban risk from specific strategies that contemplate the array of relevant local hazards.

Palabras llave : social perception; risk; vulnerability; hazard landscape; fear.

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