Personalising the message: promoting cyclone protection in North Queensland
Cyclones cause significant damage to property, infrastructure and housing. Fortunately, property owners can undertake structural upgrades to reduce damage. However, installation of structural upgrades in cyclone-prone regions such as North Queensland has been relatively low. This paper explains why some people do, and others do not, install structural upgrades. Research to date has identified psychological factors that may predict mitigation behaviour for other natural hazards, but there are few studies that investigated cyclone-specific mitigation behaviour. This paper addresses this gap and identifies the psychological factors that promote mitigation behaviour for structures and presents a method of segmenting groups based on these psychological factors. Implications for risk communication messages to promote the adoption of household-level structural upgrades are discussed.