From wallets to natural hazard warnings – triggering preparation action
The biggest challenge for emergency agencies, one that floats up like a Dementor in the after-action reviews, is always your work with the community.
In Australia between 2006 and 2015, recommendations from reviews and inquiries around community relations stubbornly sat at around 20% of all recommendations.
I have experienced the challenge of motivating people to get ready, especially when they prioritise getting through day-to-day life over a disaster that ‘probably won’t happen to them’ - this optimism bias is a huge obstacle.
But it turns out that one of the keys to the preparation messaging holy grail is all about cost – not just the wallet, but human costs.
Researcher Ziyao Wang and their team wanted to find out the degree and type of damage that can trigger protective action in future. They drew on existing data from Taiwanese residents relating to flood and earthquake. In their analysis, they’ve pretty emphatically solved the yes-it-does/no-it-doesn’t dilemma presented in previous research of whether past experience affects how well people will get ready for a natural hazard.
They also wanted to see how much a person’s resilience is strengthened by disaster preparation, AND how trust in agencies also influences communities to get ready.
Their key findings?
Past experience prompts people to get ready, but only if lives were threatened or lost or the damage was expensive for the individual in the past. This helps explain why some studies find that past experience doesn’t make a different to how motivated people are to get ready. In North Queensland, Australia, we find people digging in to stay rather than evacuating, even though (or possibly because) they have experienced cyclones in the past and ‘managed OK’.
A person’s resilience, which was measured by asking a question about their ability to rebuild or purchase after extensive damage, HAS A STRONGER INFLUENCE than pre-disaster preparation on their recovery. It seems obvious that access to resources will speed recovery, but as a society, we bet the farm on preparation communication by government instead of ensuring everyone has access to resources across society generally. Depressing for us working in the protective action field!
It reinforces many other studies that show that a person’s own social network, plus information from the internet (vague), prompts disaster preparation (another heuristic at work – social norms theory). We could see potential for a huge social norms effect in Cyclone Alfred as it approached Brisbane early in 2025 – at a street level, many householders were visibly getting ready, and this was reported by legacy media and amplified. Hopefully we’ll have research down the track on massive preparation levels for this mercurial event (and also how people viewed the communication around the delay of this storm’s arrival).
A strong government response will motivate people to get ready BUT high trust in government did not have a positive effect. This finding was a surprise. Many other studies have shown that trust in agencies can provide the trigger to get ready. Cyclone Alfred did anecdotally show a strong government response alongside an active community response that I would attribute partly to trust in the State Emergency Service, the Bureau of Meteorology and Queensland Fire Departmment. There could be cultural factors in their findings.
What does it mean for how we communicate?
Use storytelling – the people who lost most have compelling stories to tell AND a drive to ensure no-one lives what they have lived through. This is effective when you have communities that have not experienced a big event for some time in an area known for a particular type of hazard. You can have a look at this type of effect in this case study of a Blue Mountains, NSW, community that hadn’t experienced a bushfire for some time and used storytelling from old timers to trigger preparation activity.
We know that people who are well networked into their community recover better and faster than those who don’t, regardless of their personal resources. Supporting communities to work together will help them to share resources and bring everyone with them in recovery - they have ‘social capital’. Dr Daniel Aldrich talks a lot about the role of social capital in mitigation – it’s also a key quality for effective disaster preparation.
Social networks are key (you’ll already have this on your list!). Use them to highlight preparation activity within communities. It’s storytelling again - get people to tell their preparation stories and then share this in a form that can get into their networks. Share photos of every activity you do with your community. Follow up those that you know have gone home and taken action, and share their stories too.
Support your leaders in understanding that a strong response has a positive effect on preparation for those disasters that have some lead time – give them strong and simple messages on what people can be doing to get ready. Help THEM tell stories.
And…don’t beat yourself up…
Every activity you do with your community to help them prepare has some effect. But just remember that you can’t win all the time.
Bushfire Researcher, Dr Ken Strahan discovered that there are two categories of householder who are hard to get through to, if at all: the Threat Denier and the Responsibility Denier. In his research, they made up 23.5% of his population – this means there is a large number of people that you will never connect or resonate with.
Transfer your energy to the other 76.5% of your community that you CAN help.
Go well!
