Modeling Stakeholders’ Perceptions in Participatory Multi-risk Assessment on a Deltaic Environment Under Climate Change Conditions

Abstract

AbstractModern concepts in water resources management and related risk assessment necessitate participatory approaches with stakeholders having a key role in the respective processes. The objective of the article is to (i) integrate stakeholders’ opinions and preferences on identified hazards, i.e., coastal flooding, water scarcity, and heat stress, derived by physically based numerical modeling under current and future climate change conditions and attributed in the form of an Integrated deltaic risk index (IDRI) at a specific case study area, and (ii) investigate whether and how the stakeholders’ opinions differentiate the initial outputs coming from the mathematical models. Doing so, stakeholders’ mapping was conducted in tandem with interviews for the detection of responsibilities, tasks, importance, and influence, followed by a structured questionnaire for registering the stakeholders’ perception on climate change impacts and relevant estimated hazards at the same deltaic case study area. Thereafter, a stakeholder-based risk assessment model was constructed based on two methods: (a) stakeholders’ opinion and answers about the impact of each identified hazard are equally taken into consideration, and (b) stakeholders are divided into groups and evaluated through multi-criteria analysis. Finally, the produced weights by the two methods are appropriately coupled with the identified hazards and resulted in the development of a Stakeholder Participatory multi-Risk Index (SPmRI) per method. The comparison of the produced SPmRIs with the IDRI, which was formulated without considering any stakeholders’ participation, reveals noticeable differentiation of modeled outputs especially in cases of high index values, corroborating the need for stakeholders’ opinion inclusion through the SPmRI approach. The proposed methodology fosters the interaction of stakeholders’ perception with modeling-based hazard assessment as a modern tool for decision-making processes.