Understanding sustainable disaster mitigation of stakeholder engagement: Risk perception, trust in public institutions, and disaster insurance

Many rural settlements in China's western mountainous regions are affected by mountain disasters, such as landslides and mudslides. For residents living in landslide-prone areas, behaviors related to disaster risk mitigation (such as purchasing disaster insurance) are inevitably affected by disaster risk perception. Due to the substantial differences in disaster occurrence patterns, landslide-related insurance research is relatively rare compared with insurance research focused on other types of natural disasters (e.g., floods and droughts). Based on the results of questionnaires administered in landslide-prone areas in Chongqing, China, this paper uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to investigate the relationships among the questionnaire respondents' risk perception, trust in public institutions (TPI), and willingness to buy disaster insurance (WBDI). The results reveal that risk perception and TPI directly affect WBDI. Here, competence, participation, possibility perception, and fear perception are significantly positively correlated to WBDI, whereby fear perception has the largest impact, followed by possibility perception, competence, and participation. In addition, TPI indirectly affects WBDI through risk perception. Here, competence reduces fear perception and indirectly reduces WBDI. The implications of these results for theory are discussed. This study introduces a new method to support disaster risk mitigation-related decision making that can be useful to governments and individuals.