Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding.

尽管欧洲越来越多的人遭受洪水风险，但人们对洪水风险的认识仍然很低，有效的洪水风险管理政策很少得到实施。了解地方政府如何设计有效的洪水风险管理政策以应对洪水风险变得越来越重要。在本文中，我们研究高洪水风险和洪水风险感知是否与对洪水风险管理策略的特定设计的需求相关。我们以瑞士为例，分析了阿雷河沿岸18个易受洪灾城市的洪水风险管理组合。我们介绍了风险分析和公共政策数据的新颖组合：我们分析记录的洪水暴露数据与针对选定洪水风险管理措施的洪水风险感知和政策偏好调查数据之间的相关性。我们的结果表明，具有较高洪水风险感知能力的地方政府倾向于采用非结构性措施，例如空间规划和生态河流修复，而不是基础设施措施。相反，洪水风险既不与洪水风险感知相关，也不与政策偏好相关。我们得出的结论是，洪水风险感知是关键：它可以决定性地影响地方政府实施特定的多元化政策组合的偏好，包括采取更多预防性或综合性洪水风险管理措施。