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

Abstract

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