The Role of Information and Dissemination Activities in Enhancing People’s Willingness to Implement Natural Water Retention Measures

Abstract

Under a climate-change scenario, adaptation strategies to pluvial flood risk are crucial in urban and rural areas. Natural water retention measures are particularly helpful to manage runoff water, providing also additional co-benefits to the local population. However, the very limited knowledge of their benefits among citizens hinders their implementation, especially across southern European countries. Therefore, information and dissemination activities aimed at showing the benefits of these measures are particularly important to stimulate implementation by private citizens, although only a few studies have previously investigated their role. This paper considers some demonstrations of natural water retention measures—and the related information and dissemination activities to the local population—in northeastern Italy, explicitly including them as a driver in the Protection Motivation Theory framework. Through a direct survey of 219 households, it aims to quantitatively assess the impact on citizens’ willingness to implement natural water retention measures of the different levels of access to information provision, namely, the role played by active access through participation in the activities; passive access to available information; and no access. The results show that citizens’ willingness to implement the interventions on their properties is positively affected by their active access to information, thus highlighting the importance of high-quality information provision by public and private actors.