Content area
Full Text
Keywords
Disasters, Community planning, Disaster management
Abstract
With regard to their utility in predicting the adoption of household hazard preparations, traditional approaches to public education directed at increasing awareness and/or risk perception have proven ineffective. Discusses reasons why this may have occurred from public education, vulnerability analysis, and community resilience perspectives and outlines strategies for enhancing preparedness. Describes a model of resilience to hazard effects that has been tested in different communities and for different hazards (toxic waste, environmental degradation and volcanic hazards). Drawing upon the health education literature, introduces a model for promoting the adoption on preparatory behaviour. Discusses links between these models, and the need for their implementation within a community development framework.
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Introduction
Substantial funds are expended annually on risk communication programmes to promote natural hazard preparedness (e.g. storing food and water, fixing high furniture and hot water cylinders to walls, preparing a household evacuation plan). The adoption of these measures facilitates a capability for coping with the temporary disruption associated with hazard activity and with minimising damage and insurance costs. Despite these efforts, the level of preparedness within communities has fallen short of expectations (Lindell and Whitney, 2000), leaving households vulnerable to subsequent hazard effects. This paper discusses reasons why this may have occurred and outlines strategies for enhancing preparedness. It does so from public education, vulnerability analysis, and community resilience perspectives.
Public education
While considerable work has been directed to understanding how to construct effective risk messages (Nathe et al., 1999), care must be taken with regard to assuming that the provision of information on hazards or risk will facilitate the adoption of preventive measures. The information-action link assumes that recipients automatically assimilate, comprehend and utilise information in forming and following action plans. This assumption is often unjustified.
For example, evaluation of a volcanic risk communication programme (Ballantyne et al., 2000) revealed that providing hazard information resulted in some 28 per cent of respondents feeling less concerned about hazards. People inferred that the source of the information (local government) would take responsibility for managing both the hazard and their safety, reducing the likelihood of their both attending to...