APPLYING EVIDENCE TO CASCADIA RISK COMMUNICATION (Invited Presentation)

The great majority of effective safety, mitigation, and resilience efforts are based on engineered rather than behavioral improvements, but there is ample evidence on the latter. Effective risk communication is impossible without understanding risk perception and the tendency towards risk personalization. The most common approach, particularly by scientists, assumes an audience knowledge deficit, resulting in safety-education models becoming default replacements for actual communication. This tendency can be exacerbated by the gap between common perception (and thus individual tendency to act) and expert assessment. The difference between packaging objective information and actually reaching audiences has been potently demonstrated by responses to standard scientific messages vs. popular-press content.

Effective risk communication includes identifying and tailoring messages to audiences, minimizing jargon, and defining and incorporating uncertainty, but all of that must be tied to clear objectives and ideally a means of evaluation. Defining success by participation in groups or scheduled activities (e.g., many Citizen Corps and ShakeOut programs) as opposed to true behavioral change forces a focus on headcounts; this may help perpetuate programs but may not actually enhance resilience. Behavioral change at the policy level can mean land-use decisions and code adoption as well as improving hazard vulnerability analyses, which can aid in prioritizing preparedness activities among finite resources.

Effective risk communication to policy-makers starts by recognizing that they have the same biases and heuristics as the rest of the population. Policy-makers are faced with multiple competing priorities with respect to natural hazards, particularly given the inherent conflict between uncommon events with inconsistent recurrence and economic drivers with a constant presence. Regardless of audience, effective risk communication must demonstrate relevance and benefit.