Although both improved risk communication and the building of social capacities have been advocated as vital ways to increase societies' resilience towards natural hazards across the world, the literature has rarely examined the ways in which these two concepts may integrate in theory and practice. This paper is an attempt to address this gap in a European context. It begins with a conceptual discussion that unites the literature on risk communication with the literature on social capacity building. We then use the insights from this discussion as a basis to conduct a review of 60 risk communication practices from across Europe. This review indicates a gap between theory and practice because, whilst the literature highlights the importance of integrated and coordinated communication campaigns featuring both a one-way transfer and a two-way dialogue between the public, stakeholders and decision-makers, the majority of the communication practices reviewed here appear to be relatively disparate initiatives that rely on one-way forms of communication. On the basis of these findings, we conclude by making some recommendations for the way in which such practices could be improved in order to be more supportive of social capacities across Europe.
Keywords Risk communication Á Capacity building Á Participation Á Warning Á PreventionElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article
Abstract. Over the last ten years, a risk-based approach to manage natural hazards -termed the risk concept -has been introduced to the management of natural hazards in Switzerland. Large natural hazard events, new political initiatives and limited financial resources have led to the development and introduction of new planning instruments and software tools that should support natural hazard engineers and planners to effectively and efficiently deal with natural hazards. Our experience with these new instruments suggests an improved integration of the risk concept into the community of natural hazard engineers and planners. Important factors for the acceptance of these new instruments are the integration of end-users during the development process, the knowledge exchange between science, developers and end-users as well as training and education courses for users. Further improvements require the maintenance of this knowledge exchange and a mindful adaptation of the instruments to case-specific circumstances.
a b s t r a c tEarly Warning Systems (EWS) are increasingly applied to mitigate the risks posed by natural hazards. To compare the effect of EWS with alternative risk reduction measures and to optimize their design and operation, their reliability and effectiveness must be quantified. In the present contribution, a framework approach to the evaluation of threshold-based EWS for natural hazards is presented. The system reliability is classically represented by the Probability of Detection (POD) and Probability of False Alarms (PFA). We demonstrate how the EWS effectiveness, which is a measure of risk reduction, can be formulated as a function of POD and PFA. To model the EWS and compute the reliability, we develop a framework based on Bayesian Networks, which is further extended to a decision graph, facilitating the optimization of the warning system. In a case study, the framework is applied to the assessment of an existing debris flow EWS. The application demonstrates the potential of the framework for identifying the important factors influencing the effectiveness of the EWS and determining optimal warning strategies and system configurations.
This paper demonstrates the application of cost effectiveness analysis and cost benefit analysis to alternative avalanche risk reduction strategies in Davos, Switzerland. The advantages as well as limitations of such analysis for natural hazards planning are discussed with respect to 16 avalanche risk reduction strategies. Scenarios include risk reduction measures that represent the main approaches to natural hazards planning in Switzerland, such as technical, organisational, and land use planning measures. The methodologies used outline how concepts and techniques from risk analysis, hazard mapping, Geographic Information System, and economics can be interdisciplinary combined. The results suggest important considerations, such as possible sources of uncertainty due to different choices in the calculation of cost effectiveness ratio and net present value. Given the parameters and assumptions, it seems as if the current approach to avalanche risk reduction in the study area approximates to economic and cost efficiency and serves the aim of reducing risk to human fatalities.
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