Making Climate Risks Governable in Swedish Municipalities: Crisis Preparedness, Technical Measures, and Public Involvement

Creating preparedness for climate change has become an increasingly important task for society. In Sweden, the responsibility for crisis preparedness rests to a large extent on the municipalities. Through an interview study of municipal officials, this paper examines municipalities’ crisis preparedn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inClimate (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 7; p. 90
Main Authors Lidskog, Rolf, Rabe, Linn
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2022
Subjects
Citizenship
Climate change
Climatic extremes
cloudburst
Community involvement
Crises
crisis preparedness
Cyclones
Drought
Emergency preparedness
Empirical analysis
Environmental risk
extreme weathers
Floods
Governance
heatwaves
Municipalities
Perceptions
Public involvement
Rain
risk communication
risk governance
Risk management
Society
Sociologi
Sociology
Sweden
Sweden
Europe
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Summary:Creating preparedness for climate change has become an increasingly important task for society. In Sweden, the responsibility for crisis preparedness rests to a large extent on the municipalities. Through an interview study of municipal officials, this paper examines municipalities’ crisis preparedness for climate change and the role they assign to citizens. The theoretical approach is that of risk governance, which adopts an inclusive approach to risk management, and that of risk sociology, which states that how a problem is defined determines how it should be handled and by whom. The empirical results show that the municipal officials mainly discuss technically defined risks, such as certain kinds of climate-related extreme events, the handling of which does not require any substantial involvement of citizens. Citizens’ responsibility is only to be individually prepared, and thereby they do not require municipal resources to protect their own properties in the case of an extreme event. The municipalities, however, feel that their citizens have not developed this individual preparedness and therefore they try to better inform them. This analysis finds five different views of citizens, all with their own problems, and to which the municipalities respond with different communicative measures. By way of conclusion, three crucial aspects are raised regarding the task of making societies better prepared for climate change.
ISSN:2225-1154
2225-1154
DOI:10.3390/cli10070090