Private risk reduction behaviours can significantly reduce the negative impacts of flooding and flash floods. Over the past decades, researchers have used various socio-cognitive models or threat/coping mechanisms to explain individual protective behaviours. However, these models ignore that people are not equally ready to act upon a danger and they give limited insights into the effectiveness of communication strategies to foster risk reduction behaviours. Therefore, we explored the current state of homeowner's readiness to undertake risk reduction behaviours in flood risk areas by applying a dynamic protection motivation framework. We conducted a survey in an Italian municipality that experienced severe flash flooding in September 2018. The results show that people are motivated by different factors in prompting risk reduction behaviour based on their type of protective measures. For example, people that undertook structural or avoidance measures are more likely to be motivated to protect themselves by increased perceptions of vulnerability and response efficacy, and are less worried about expected flood losses compared to people that undertook only basic emergency measures. In this paper, we argue how these new insights contribute to target flood risk communication strategies to groups of individuals characterized by different readiness stages and motivations to protect themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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