Acceptable flood risk in residential land-uses in Ipswich, Queensland

The role of land use planning in mitigating risks from natural hazards, including flooding hazards, while promoting a better quality of life for communities is well practiced. In recent decades, there has been a tendency to use the 1% Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) flood to represent minimum level of flood-risk occupants should be exposed to. However, larger floods can and do occur, such as those which devastated southeast Queensland in 1979, 2011, 2013, Victoria 2010, 2011 and Newcastle in 2015. The outcome of contemporary land-use planning, to some level, has increased flooding risk of residential areas across Australia. Further to this, the perceptions of floodplain residents who may experience the impacts of flooding are rarely explored when assessing acceptable risk levels that inform the establishment of flood-prone land use policy. From this, what may actually constitutes an acceptable level of risk for residential development is a vexed issue. This paper constructs a research approach that aims to analyse determinants of flood risk acceptance and their interdependence. Based on theory and previous empirical evidence, we develop an analytical model that involves personalised risk assessment, based on: cognitive/affective evaluations, stable psychological variables (such as trust) and contextual/personal variables (such as age, gender, residency period, and geographical differences). This model will be tested through an Australian survey data using multivariate analysis techniques that apply structural equation modelling