In areas susceptible to experiencing natural hazard activity, a prominent risk management strategy is encouraging people to prepare in ways that increase their capacity to anticipate, cope with, adapt to, and recover from hazard impacts. Despite extensive efforts to do so, levels of hazard preparedness remain low even when people acknowledge their risk. This paper proposes that one reason for this has been the incorrect assumption that just providing people with information on risk and its management is sufficient to motivate them to prepare. It is argued that preparedness is a function of how people interpret hazards and the information available about them. This paper discusses how this proposition was examined by developing and testing a theoretical model that describes how interpretive processes at person and community levels interact with people´s relationship with civic risk management agencies to explain differences in levels of hazard preparedness. The paper discusses the all-hazards and cross-cultural utility of the model using data for volcanic (New Zealand, Japan and Indonesia), earthquake (New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan) and bushfire (Australia and Portugal) hazards. The paper also illustrates how while similar processes can be implicated in each country, culture-specific processes (in Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia) influence how they are enacted to influence hazard preparedness. The implications of these findings for collaborative learning and research between countries are discussed, as is the potential for enhancing the effectiveness of risk communication by integrating risk management activities with community development strategies.
Douglas Paton, PhD, C. Psychol.
Douglas is a Professor (School of Psychology, University of Tasmania) and a Research Fellow at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research (New Zealand). He is a member of the Psychosocial Recovery Advisory Group for the Christchurch earthquake, the Integrated Research for Disaster Reduction Committee (UN-ISDR), the National Mental Health Disaster Response Taskforce (Australia), and a Principle Scientific Advisor to the Bushfire CRC. He was previously involved in developing resilience policy with UNESCO (Natural Disaster Preparedness in the Asia-Pacific program), NATO, the US Government Accountability Office, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Douglas’s research focuses on developing and testing models of resilience (adaptive capacity) for natural hazards. An all-hazards and cross cultural approach is adopted with research being conducted in Australia (bushfire, flooding, tsunami), New Zealand (earthquake, volcanic), Japan (earthquake), Indonesia (volcanic), Taiwan (earthquake, typhoon), and Portugal (bushfire). Douglas has published 18 books, 60 book chapters and 121 peer reviewed articles.
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