Environmental Science and Policy 132 (2022) 190–197 1462-9011/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Capturing food community perceptions for social vulnerability reduction and risk management planning Gustavo Manuel Cruz-Bello * , Miriam Alfe-Cohen Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Aut´ onoma Metropolitana Unidad Cuajimalpa, Avenida Vasco de Quiroga 4871, Col. Santa Fe, Mexico City 05348, Mexico A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Participatory methods Social vulnerability reduction Flood risk reduction plans Collective memory ABSTRACT Reducing vulnerability is the aim of food risk management plans, yet their success depends on acceptance and implementation by their community. It is important, then, to study approaches that encourage societal partic- ipation in decision-making. The present study combined three participatory methods to capture and understand local knowledge on food vulnerability reduction in a coastal town in southern Mexico. As a feasibility outcome, we found that these kinds of approaches involving community participation and consultation are attainable and easy to integrate into the local planning processes of vulnerability reduction and food risk management. On process outcomes, we found that the community is aware of the food risk given by their spatial location, has taken actions to adapt, and proposed other actions to reduce their vulnerability. We found no quantitative relationship between the levels of food delimited by the participatory geographic information systems approach and the community’s socioeconomic characteristics obtained by the house survey. Still, qualitative analysis of the three methods revealed that the collective memory of experiencing a food plays a signifcant role in the mea- sures the population takes to adapt and reduce vulnerability. 1. Introduction Of all disasters in the period 1998–2017, those produced by extreme climatological events were the most frequent. Among them, foods represented 43% of all recorded events (Wallemacq and House, 2018). Together with droughts, foods affect the largest number of people in the world (Albertini et al., 2020); they disturb the property, infrastructure, and lives of more than 100 million people per year and cause about half of all deaths from weather-related disasters (di Baldassarre et al., 2013). Additionally, food risk is increasing in many parts of the planet due to population growth, land-use change, and climate change. One way to reduce the impacts of foods is to create risk-reduction plans, which can help to prevent disasters and inform the population about measures to take to reduce food risk. However, these plans are not always adopted by the communities and local governments do not necessarily put enough emphasis on promoting them. One way to increase the accep- tance and implementation of these plans is to involve affected commu- nities in the planning process, which has even been stated in international and regional treaties (Wehn et al., 2015). In this context, many studies in recent years have focused on community participation in risk management plans. Stakeholders’ participation has been considered as a medium to achieve integrated food risk management and a better way to reach consensus (Thaler and Levin-Keitel, 2016). Although natural causes of foods are the atmosphere, the rivers, and the catchments (Amoako and Boamah, 2015; Cirella et al., 2019; Dhital and Kayastha, 2013), many studies attribute increases in food damage to changes in the vulnerability of communities (Ciullo et al., 2017). The main way to reduce food risk, then, is to help communities understand and reduce vulnerability to increase adaptive capacity and resilience. The process of enforcing and engaging communities in decision-making processes and decentralized actions can empower them and transform the socio-ecological systems. People in communities know both their vulnerability and their capacity to reduce it, and they can adapt to hazards (Rahman et al., 2018). In this context, environmental gover- nance promotes people’s participation in risk management, sociopolit- ical transformations, and ecological challenges. Multilevel governance promotes participation and deliberation be- tween many stakeholders. This kind of governance considers the rela- tionship between vertical levels of government as well as horizontal forms of governance to incorporate lower-level administrative units, small social groups, and socio-political formations to the decision- making process, emphasizing their capacity to manage resources and * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: gcruz@cua.uam.mx (G.M. Cruz-Bello), malfe@cua.uam.mx (M. Alfe-Cohen). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Science and Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.02.029 Received 14 July 2021; Received in revised form 27 January 2022; Accepted 27 February 2022