Short abstract

Beyond the knowledge deficit model, this study examines flood risk in Italy as an affective experience. Using mixed methods, it highlights how climate emotions trigger immediate protection while potentially constraining long-term adaptation. Risk communication is a relational, world-making practice.

Long abstract

Extreme flood events are increasingly experienced as moments in which climate change becomes affectively and materially present in everyday life. Across Europe, recurrent flooding has produced not only casualties and damage, but also fear, uncertainty, anger and fatigue, reshaping how citizens relate to institutions, expertise and futures. This paper examines flood risk communication and preparedness in Italy as a domain in which climate knowledge, emotions and practices are co-produced in uneven and contested ways.

Drawing on a mixed-methods study conducted within the project Risk Communication and Engagement for Societal Resilience, the paper combines a nationally representative survey (n = 2,500) with a deliberative public consultation involving 100 citizens. Rather than treating risk perception as a scientific deficit, the analysis attends to how flood risk is lived and felt through memories of past events, anticipatory anxieties, trust and distrust in warning infrastructures, and ambivalent expectations towards public authorities.

Trought a public consultation, we engage STS debates on environmental thinking, climate feelings and situated forms of knowing. The paper explores how perception and attitude to flooding both enable and constrain preparedness and collective action. It shows how emotions can simultaneously mobilise protective practices and foreclose imaginaries of long-term adaptation. In this sense, flood risk communication emerges as an affective, relational and world-making practice, central to how liveable futures are imagined and inhabited on a planet increasingly shaped by climate extremes.