Treating risk as relational on shore platforms and implications for public safety on microtidal rocky coasts

Drowning on rocky coasts is a problem with global significance, but it is a particularly acute issue in Australia where rocky coasts account for 19% of coastal drownings. The risk of drowning is often framed as a consequence of waves washing over shore platforms, which sweep unsuspecting victims into the sea. Although the physical processes of ‘wave overtopping’ are understood, few studies have investigated which elements of shore platform environments are perceived as being hazardous. Using coastal regions of Victoria, Australia, as the case, this study explores how Victoria’s lifesaving community perceives risk on shore platforms. These perceptions are then compared to quantitative risk ratings to analyse whether physical risk assessments designed by coastal risk experts align with lifesavers’ perceptions. Lifesavers are non-certified risk ‘experts’, whose safety training and exposure to hazardous situations inform their ‘experiential-expertise’, which is contrasted with the more common quantitative and science-based ‘expert’ risk assessments. The aim is to explore lifesavers perceptions of risk and to contrast two different ‘expert’ constructions of risk; one of which is experience based and the other a more traditional quantitative output of modelling. Exploration of this type of ‘expert’–expert hazard contrast is lacking with a management focus on lay perceptions. To understand how lifesavers perceive risk on shore platforms, the authors explore risk as relational. This conceptual approach takes an important first step towards thinking about risk as more than the simple combination of physical wave overtopping process and social perceptions. Instead, it seeks to understand the socio-environmental interactions that are perceived as hazardous. Data for this analysis were collected via an online questionnaire of Surf Life Saving Australia membership whose patrols are within 1 km of a shore platform in Victoria, Australia (n = 4683). By thinking about risk as relational, ‘slipping’ emerges as an under-explored hazard on shore platforms, despite being the main contributor to how lifesavers, themselves, unintentionally entered the sea. This study shows that the prevailing way of framing risk—perpetuated by the media and expert risk models—is often divorced from how risk is perceived by ‘experiential-experts’. This suggests coastal risk policy needs to integrate perceptions of the socio-environmental interactions that produce risk with the aim of accommodating the relational ways people perceive risk on shore platforms.