Seismic Risk Communication in Europe: Lessons Learned and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Since the 1980s various international directives and frameworks have acknowledged the potential of risk communication to foster community empowerment. However, to achieve empowerment, communication has to be effective. When it comes to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, science communication requires the involvement of communities as a whole, promoting bottom-up strategies and proactive engagement. In this light, we conducted a scoping review of scientific publications on seismic risk communication in Europe published between 2000 and 2022. We focused on how seismic risk communication has changed in that time span, looking for targeted approaches, tools, recipients and channels. Here we provide an overview of the results obtained from the analysis of 109 selected publications, also highlighting the importance of scientific communication as a transnational problem, due to the mobility of modern society. Our study reveals that seismic risk communication in Europe is becoming increasingly proactive, focusing on a bottom-up strategy that relies on youth to build the resilience of future generations. The potential for the community empowerment has been primarily addressed with seismic risk communication during the pre-crisis phase of the disaster, when risk awareness can be effectively raised. Social media are increasingly used to provide timely and actionable information in times of crisis, to engage citizens within a two-way risk communication model, in the pre-crisis time, and to provide scientific data for post-disaster processing. The future agenda of seismic risk communication in Europe should focus on building trust with the public, moving towards a three-way model of seismic risk communication and, even more importantly, taking action to curb the spread of fake news and their negative impact on disaster management. Last but not least, more efforts should be made to link practice and theory and explicitly build seismic risk communication on theoretical models.