Despite increasing flood risks, household adaptation often remains below the level required to reduce vulnerability. Understanding how adaptation behavior spreads through communities is therefore an important research challenge. This thesis explores how changing social networks influence the spread of household flood adaptation behavior. In many real-world settings, social connections are not static: people form new relationships, lose contact with others, and interact with varying intensity over time. These processes, referred to as co-evolutionary network dynamics, may affect how households become aware of and decide to adopt flood protection measures. Despite their potential importance, their role in adaptation diffusion remains insufficiently understood.

To address this, this thesis extends the empirically grounded Flood Adaptation via Social Transformation (FAST) agent-based model with co-evolutionary social network dynamics. These include the formation and breaking of social ties as well as changes in the strength of interactions between households. The model is used to systematically explore how different configurations of these dynamics influence both the structure of the social network and the resulting adaptation behavior.... ... Read more