Low-attention flooding disasters are events that receive lower widespread attention because they cause relatively fewer impacts, as measured by mortality or economic losses, compared to larger disasters. These events are important, however, because they disrupt daily lives and their impacts are expected to increase with aging infrastructure systems and changing weather patterns. Evidence exists for low-attention floods becoming the new normal in both Japan and the UK. There is an urgent need to understand the impacts and adaptation policies for low-attention events, especially since they disproportionately stress underprivileged populations, leading to increased societal inequality. Major cities with sufficient budgets, including New York and Tokyo, are already preparing for such events, but this might not be an option for all cities as their impacts increase. This project studied the human impacts of low-attention flooding events, specifically population mobility and its intersection with social vulnerability. This project was conducted in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University.

The key hypothesis of this proposal was that when exposed to low-attention flooding events, socially vulnerable and marginalized populations in Japan and the UK are more likely to experience unwanted displacement and prolonged impacts after the emergency period compared to higher-resourced populations because of increased flood exposure, depleted individual resources, or lack of public or private financial support. This project has contributed to Priority 1 of the Sendai Framework by understanding disaster risk to ultimately work towards reducing the number of affected populations by 2030.

This project applied a human-focused mixed methods approach to study awareness of population mobility due to low-attention flooding, or events that receive lower widespread attention due to their smaller scale but have the potential to compound pre-existing social vulnerability. For this, the project utilized a documentary-making approach, combined with computer simulations of how floods happen in vulnerable communities. The project studied two case study locations in the United Kingdom (Liverpool) and Japan (Tokyo), two countries with differing underlying vulnerabilities and disaster policy structures, to understand how people are aware of some small-scale risks. As part of this collaboration, there is currently a journal paper that is being drafted, regarding how storytelling and digital media can inform adaptation to sea level rise and other climate stressors.