Do information and citizens characteristics affect public acceptability of landslide protection measures? A latent class approach

The Italian Alps are increasingly vulnerable to landslides. Residents and visitors are exposed to serious socio-economic consequences from these natural events. Hence, risk mitigation is a major safety issue for local authorities. Publicly funded adaptation interventions are expensive to implement and cause the need to better understand acceptability of protection measures, and their economic efficiency. We investigate social demand for landslide protection in Boite Valley (North-Eastern Alps) by adopting a choice experiment survey approach. We specifically address the impact of information on preferences by eliciting them before and after providing respondents with visual simulations of possible catastrophic events. Choice data are used to estimate a Latent Class-Random Parameters model. This allows us to identify segments of the population with different preference profiles towards safety measures and their sensitivity to information treatments. Marginal willingness to pay (mWTP) values for protection measures are estimated and mapped to describe the spatial distribution of benefits from risk reduction. Overall, we found mWTP values to vary spatially and to be dependent on information and socio-economic characteristics.