FiBeGa- Filling the Behavioral Gap in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation
Do only foolish people drown and only compulsive gamblers suffer flood losses? Conventional wisdom is based on flawed underlying assumptions and the EU vision of a disaster- and climate- resilient society cannot be achieved by relying on “behavior-blind” assessments and policy. Whilst the behavior of individuals, businesses and public services before, during and after a crisis has a significant impact on damages, recovery and resilience, current assessments fail to include such critical factors becasue they are hardly understood.
Floods and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change. Despite trillions of public funds invested, current flood reduction and planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives. This is due to a mismatch between the rising application of risk, vulnerability and resilience assessments and the understanding of their empirical validity. The overreaching goal of this proposal is to move from “behavior-aware” assessments, indicators and policies to save lives and public money. Lifting the current barriers to predicting and simulating risk perception and behavior will create forefront knowledge and open new horizons. Social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge making new empirical research essential to refine or replace existing theories. This project will provide four demonstrators representative of the European and Mediterranean context, graded in size, wealth and exposure to reach general considerations: Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest and Algiers. It is aiming at cross-validation on floods and transferability to other emergencies (technological disasters, epidemics, terrorism, etc.). It will launch a new line of research by providing “behavior-aware” participatory assessments and indicators, spatially-explicit interactive short- and long-term simulation tools enabling decision-makers to redine their strategies and policies.
Funded by the European Union (ERC, FiBeGa, 101044374). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
ontact
Samuel Rufat – Principal investigator
Samuel Rufat is a Professor of Geography at École polytechnique – CREST. He holds a joint European PhD from ENS Lyon and University of Bucharest, and a Habilitation from University Paris Cité. His research interests include urban geography, environmental inequalities, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and computational social science. He is an expert with the Community of European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS) Disaster Resilient Societies group for the European Commission. Previously, he was a Professor of Geography at CY Clergy Paris University and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Victor Santoni – Postdoctoral researcher
Victor Santoni holds a PhD in Geography, specializing in Disaster Management and Computational Geography.
His research interests in the FiBeGa program focus on comparis the Paris-area flood evacuation agent-based model to those of other European territories, as well as adapting the model to other disaster phases.
Eric Enderlin – Research Assistant
Eric Enderlin hold a university degree in applied statistics from the Nancy Faculty of Medicine and a Master 2 from the Strasbourg Insitute of Demography.
He has previously worked on the determinants of flood risk perception as part of the Risk Evacuation Resilience (RER) project at CY Cergy Paris University.
In the scope of the FiBeGa project, Eric Enderlin is in charge of data management and statistical processing of the FiBeGa 2025 survey results.
Mathias Pisch – Research Assistant
Mathias Pisch is studying engineering at ENSAE Paris, after 2 years of intensive preparation in STEM fields (Maths, Physics, Computer Science) in a PSI class in Bordeaux, for the competitive entrance exams to the Grandes Ecoles d’Ingénieurs.
He is currently working with Prof. Samuel Rufat on the FiBeGa project related to environmental inequalities and climate change adaptation using computational social science.
Kenza Miousset – Research Assistant
Kenza Miousset is a third-year student at ENSAE Paris.
In the FiBeGa project, she contributes to the development of methods for territorial data comparison and spatial harmonization. Her work focuses on analyzing socio-demographic and risk-related indicators across different European territories and the development of interpolation techniques to transition data between neighborhood-level units and the 200m square grid.
Victor Doro – Intern
Victor Doro is a final-year engineering master’s student specializing in climate sciences and energy.
His research interests include disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and complex socio-economic climate modeling. Within the project, his main objective is to contribute to the development of a spatially explicit multi-agent simulation that integrates GIS data on extreme hydro-climatic events with social data from local empirical surveys on adaptation behaviors.
Fayrouz Miled – Intern
Fayrouz Miled is a first-year master’s student in Contemporary Sociology at ENS Paris-Saclay.
As part of the FiBeGa team, she conducts a literature review on risk perception and awareness in North Africa, focusing on key thematic areas, and gathered data related to population censuses. She also contributes to the development of a new questionnaire on risk perception and participates in the analysis of data from a previous survey on the same topic.
Publications
Working papers
Articles
Citations
Schedule
- May 2025
FiBeGa workshop