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This paper examines the societal dimensions of warning decisions during extreme weather events in one of the most hurricane-prone areas in the U.S., Miami-Dade County, Florida. With the aim of informing improvements in the hurricane forecast and warning system, and better understanding warning decisions in extreme weather events, we explore how members of the public obtain and use hurricane forecasts and warnings in decision making. Results from in depth mental models interviews with members of the public (N = 28) and survey data from three counties in Florida (N = 460) show that a large majority of respondents have some hurricane experience, which influences their thinking about storm impacts, individual actions to mitigate the hazard, and vulnerability to the hazard. Comparison with results from previous research with warning system professionals (National Weather Service forecasters, media broadcasters, and public officials) indicates several gaps between professionals and laypeople including different perceptions of hurricane risks overall and related to flooding from storm surge. The findings suggest several areas for improvements in the hurricane forecast and warning system.

Both Sendai City in Japan and Seattle-King County (hereafter referred to as “Seattle”) in Washington State in the United States are in seismically active areas with high earthquake risks. An Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system has been publicly available in Japan since 2007. The ShakeAlert system on the U.S. West Coast is still being developed and was at the time of this study being rolled out to provide earthquake early warning to institutional and public users. Given the high costs, concomitant need for public funding, and protective behavior aims of EEW systems, a better understanding of how society and individuals perceive the system and how they react to alerts is crucial to maximize the benefits of EEW. In this study, we compared how Sendai and Seattle residents perceived earthquake risk and EEW effectiveness, as well as their willingness to pay (WTP) for an improved (Sendai) or newly adopted (Seattle) EEW system. Similarities in the risks of megaquakes and the differences in recent events and earthquake early warning implementation enabled us to test the extent to which associations between earthquake risk perceptions, risk preparedness, and support for government policies to reduce earthquake risks can be generalized across these contrasting conditions. We found that risk perceptions and perceived effectiveness of EEW in personal protection were significant determinants of WTP for an (improved) EEW system in both regions. However, the association of “fear” with earthquakes was a significant predictor of WTP only in the Seattle survey. One possible explanation for this is that emotional reactions to earthquakes were more varied in the Seattle sample than Sendai, likely due to the much milder earthquakes that have occurred in the Pacific Northwest of the US in recent decades than in Japan. In contrast, most Sendai respondents reported that they felt danger and fear in their recent earthquake experiences.

Many people visit or live in areas that are exposed to natural or technological hazards but lack sufficient information to protect themselves when a disaster threatens. Hazard and emergency managers in federal, state, local and tribal government, as well as scientists and educators in tsunami warning centers, try to meet this need by providing essential information about hazards and appropriate protective actions. To date, however, there has been limited guidance for the preparation of hazard education products such as maps and brochures. Accordingly, this article reviews research on hazard education, warning systems, and warning response, as well as research findings on the communication of textual, numeric, graphic, and cartographic information in risk messages. This review produced an evaluation rubric comprising eight criteria—1) general evaluation criteria, 2) hazard-specific content, 3) environmental cues content, 4) hazard warning (sources/channels/messages) content, 5) preparedness actions content, 6) response actions content, 7) numeric information, and 8) maps. These criteria are illustrated by four experts’ evaluations of six tsunami evacuation products (TEPs—brochures and standalone maps). Although the small samples of raters and TEPs limit the generalizability of the results, this evaluation shows how hazard and emergency managers can assess the quality of preliminary TEP designs before conducting more scientifically rigorous evaluations using experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

Public support for carbon emissions mitigation is crucial to motivate action to address global issues like climate change and ocean acidification (OA). Yet in the public sphere, carbon emissions mitigation policies are typically discussed in the context of climate change and rarely in the context of OA or other global change outcomes. In this paper, we advance research on OA and climate change perceptions and communication, by (i) examining causal beliefs about ocean acidification, and (ii) measuring support for mitigation policies from individuals presented with one of five different policy frames (climate change, global warming, carbon pollution, air pollution, and ocean acidification). Knowledge about OA causes and consequences is more widespread than we anticipated, though still generally low. Somewhat surprisingly, an “air pollution” mitigation frame elicits the highest degree of policy support overall, while “carbon pollution” performs no better than “climate change” or “global warming.” Framing effects are in part contingent on prior knowledge and attitudes, and mediated by concern. Perhaps due to a lack of OA awareness, the OA frame generates the least support overall, although it seems to close the gap in support associated with political orientation: the OA frame increases support among those (few) conservatives who report having heard of OA before the survey. These findings complement previous work on climate change communication and suggest the need for further research into OA as an effective way to engage conservatives in carbon emissions mitigation policy. Potentially even more promising is the air pollution framing.

Tallis, Heather; Kreis, Katharine; Olander, Lydia; Ringler, Claudia; Ameyaw, David; Borsuk, Mark E.; Fletschner, Diana; Game, Edward; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Jeuland, Marc; Kennedy, Gina; Masuda, Yuta J.; Mehta, Sumi; Miller, Nicholas; Parker, Megan; Pollino, Carmel; Rajaratnam, Julie; Wilkie, David; Zhang, Wei; Ahmed, Selena; Ajayi, Oluyede C.; Alderman, Harold; Arhonditsis, George; Azevedo, Ines; Badola, Ruchi; Bailis, Rob; Balvanera, Patricia; Barbour, Emily; Bardini, Mark; Barton, David Nicholas; Baumgartner, Jill; Benton, Tim G.; Bobrow, Emily; Bossio, Deborah; Bostrom, Ann; Braimoh, Ademola; Brondizio, Eduardo; Brown, Joe; Bryant, Benjamin P.; Calder, Ryan S.D.; Chaplin-Kramer, Becky; Cullen, Alison; DeMello, Nicole; Dickinson, Katherine L.; Ebi, Kristie L.; Eves, Heather E.; Fanzo, Jessica; Ferraro, Paul J.; Fisher, Brendan; Frongillo, Edward A.; Galford, Gillian; Garrity, Dennis; Gatere, Lydiah; Grieshop, Andrew P.; Grigg, Nicola J.; Groves, Craig; Gugerty, Mary Kay; Hamm, Michael; Hou, Xiaoyue; Huang, Cindy; Imhoff, Marc; Jack, Darby; Jones, Andrew D.; Kelsey, Rodd; Kothari, Monica; Kumar, Ritesh; Lachat, Carl; Larsen, Ashley; Lawrence, Mark; DeClerck, Fabrice; Levin, Phillip S.; Mabaya, Edward; Gibson, Jacqueline MacDonald; McDonald, Robert I.; Mace, Georgina; Maertens, Ricardo; Mangale, Dorothy I.; Martino, Robin; Mason, Sara; Mehta, Lyla; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Merz, Barbara; Msangi, Siwa; Murray, Grant; Murray, Kris A.; Naude, Celeste E.; Newlands, Nathaniel K.; Nkonya, Ephraim; Peterman, Amber; Petruney, Tricia; Possingham, Hugh; Puri, Jyotsna; Remans, Roseline; Remlinger, Lisa; Ricketts, Taylor H.; Reta, Bedilu; Robinson, Brian E.; Roe, Dilys; Rosenthal, Joshua; Shen, Guofeng; Shindell, Drew; Stewart-Koster, Ben; Sunderland, Terry; Sutherland, William J.; Tewksbury, Josh; Wasser, Heather; Wear, Stephanie; Webb, Chris; Whittington, Dale; Wilkerson, Marit; Wittmer, Heidi; Wood, Benjamin D.K.; Wood, Stephen; Wu, Joyce; Yadama, Gautam; Zobrist, Stephanie. Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2019 ;Volum 39. s. 81-93

Hazard maps are used to communicate complex scientific data with many audiences during volcanic unrest crises, but it is unclear how common hazard visualisation styles affect cognition, behaviour, and decision-making. Here we use eye-gaze tracking and questionnaires to explore how 81 people near a volcano in New Zealand read and make decisions with hazard maps for a hypothetical eruption. We find that greater mental effort is required to read early-stage hazard maps associated with higher uncertainty, and that showing integrated zones of low to high hazard can result in 1) higher perceived threat, 2) limited visual attention to the maps, and 3) more risk-averse decisions under pressure compared to visualising discrete hazard footprints. People with high prior risk perceptions demonstrate less attention to map content overall. The results show how map visualisation can influence cognition, decision-making, and behaviour, and have implications for crisis communication. For example, in the early stages of a volcanic event, integrated hazard zones may help capture audience attention by facilitating a high-level assessment of risk. As the event evolves, discrete footprints of individual hazard processes may help better inform high-stakes decisions for which detailed hazard knowledge is needed. Additionally, we find that providing simple tasks for the audience to carry out using the maps, and showing safe areas alongside hazardous areas, may encourage map reading. We discuss the implications of these findings, and present four evidence-based points for scientists to consider across a range of fields where hazard maps are used to communicate with non-specialist audiences.

Earthquake early warning systems can provide seconds to minutes of lead time by alerting people that an earthquake has started and shaking is coming, enabling them to take protective action. To examine how earthquake early warnings might be received on the U.S. West coast, we conducted surveys of residents in the west coast states of Washington, Oregon and California (N=2595) through Google paywall intercept surveys administered in three rounds between September 2014 and September 2015. A majority of residents in all states (61% WA, 54% OR, 70% CA) have personally experienced an earthquake. Those who have experienced an earthquake perceive higher risk and greater potential for effectively reducing that risk with earthquake early warning. Although respondents feel that federal and local government should pay for earthquake early warning, almost two-thirds report being willing to pay something for “an Earthquake Early Alert app on [their] smartphone or personal computer.” Median willingness to pay per month is $1. Perceived risk, perceived effectiveness of earthquake early warning, and anticipated or experienced emotional responses to earthquakes influence judgments of and preferences for earthquake early warning, although personal experience of earthquakes conditions these influences. Further, highly visible mass media communications such as the New Yorker article “The Really Big One” and the movie “San Andreas” increase earthquake risk perceptions. Overall, interest in and support for earthquake early warning on the U.S. West Coast appears strong.

Fisheries are increasingly managed with involvement of fishers and other stakeholders; this approach is believed to create ownership and maximize stakeholder buy-in. Stakeholder involvement is critical where managers lack adequate knowledge, resources to gather additional information, or resources to implement management. Such ‘data-limited’ fisheries are of global import but face challenges to meeting management goals. Sustainable management of data-limited fisheries may be improved by decision support. This paper reports results of a field experiment testing the FishPath interactive decision-support software tool for data-limited fisheries (FishPath) and its influence on stakeholder buy-in to management. In Stage 1, participants were provided a hypothetical fishery that mimicked real-world data limitations, and a tailored shortlist of management options; participants did not interact with FishPath. In Stage 2, participants collectively input the fishery into FishPath; the tool output the same management options seen in Stage 1. In Stage 3, to assess the effect of expert support, participants were randomly assigned to control and treatment groups. The control group explored output without additional support, while the treatment group explored output with support from a FishPath expert. After each stage, participants were asked to rate: 1) their support for formal management of the fishery; 2) how easy or hard they expected management of the fishery to be; and 3) how effective they expected management of the fishery to be. FishPath use increased stakeholder participants’ perceptions of the ease and effectiveness of management at each stage of the experiment, although support for management was unchanged.

As ShakeAlert, the earthquake early warning system for the West Coast of the U.S., begins its transition to operational public alerting, we explore how post-alert messaging might represent system performance. Planned post-alert messaging can provide timely, crucial information to both emergency managers and ShakeAlert operators as well as calibrate expectations among various publics or public user groups and inform their responses to future alerts. There is a concern among the scientists and emergency managers that false alerts may negatively impact trust in the system, so quickly disseminated post-alert messages are necessary. For a new early warning system, such as ShakeAlert, this is particularly relevant given that the potentially affected population is likely to be unfamiliar with this system. We address this concern in six steps: (1) assessment of ShakeAlert performance to date, (2) characterization of human behavior and response to earthquake alerts, (3) presentation of a decision tree for issuing post-alert messages, (4) design of a critical set of post-alert messaging scenarios, (5) elaboration of these scenarios with message templates for a variety of communication channels, and (6) development of a typology of earthquake alerts. We further explore methods for monitoring and evaluating ShakeAlert post-alert messaging, for continuous improvement to the system.

Few comparative international studies describe the climate change policies people are willing to support and the reasons for their support of different policies. Using survey data from 664 economics and business undergraduates in Austria, Bangladesh, Finland, Germany, Norway, and the United States, we explore how perceived risk characteristics and mental models of climate change influence support for policy alternatives. General green policies such as funding research on renewable technologies and planting trees were the overwhelmingly most popular policy alternatives. Around half the students support carbon reduction policies such as requiring higher car fuel efficiency and increasing taxes on fossil fuels. Least popular were engineering alternatives such as fertilizing the oceans and replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. Variations among nations are generally small. Support for different policy alternatives corresponds with different causal thinking. Those who hold a pollution model of the causes of climate change, tend to blame environmental harms (e.g., air pollution from toxic chemicals), see general green policy alternatives as effective, and support general green policies. Support of carbon reduction strategies is associated with seeing carbon emissions as the cause and reducing carbon emissions as effective solutions. Support of engineering solutions increases with identifying volcanoes among causes and regarding engineering solutions as effective. Although these international students agree that climate change is a threatening problem, their causal thinking correlates with support for different mitigative policy actions, with the most popular ones not necessarily the most effective.

This paper analyzes whether regulating “hot spots” of toxic air pollution by increasing the spatial resolution of regulation could address environmental justice (EJ) concerns. To examine this question, this paper develops a decision model of a regulator choosing emission controls within a net cost minimizing framework. An empirical application of the model using air toxic emission data for Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties in Florida estimates the emission standards and spatial distribution of risks at a coarse and a finer spatial resolutions. Implications for EJ are analyzed by combining the simulated spatial risk distributions at the two resolutions with the demographic data. Results indicate that different measures of EJ point to different conclusions regarding the question of whether finer resolution regulation alleviates EJ concerns. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for EJ policy.

Science and technology have transformed risks and communications in the last century. Smallpox is gone, and polio is fading fast, thanks to vaccines. Communications, commerce and risk have gone global. Wireless networks, wideband communications and immersive interfaces are already in some homes. In the future, ubiquitous communications aids in the form of smart risk agents could tailor both the medium and the message, placing a risk in context for a specific person. By sensing physical risk characteristics and collecting and synthesizing risk information, weighted by judgments about the sources of that information, and conveying these in the media of choice, a smart agent or active technology could provide the ultimate risk communication. Yet theories of risk communication are in their infancy, with some emphasizing cognition and risk control, others social and affective responses that drive behavioral change. To create moral agents, we need to understand how our own and others’ values and goals arise and change in this increasingly information intense society, and how virtual realities can evoke or displace affect, cognition, and social context—that is, life as we know it. Otherwise, we may cross the divide from informed decision making to persuasion without reason.

Childhood vaccines are among the most effective preventive interventions that exist. In recent years, however, concerns about the risks of vaccination have arisen and, in some cases, have caused parents to consider not having their children immunized. In order to improve the process of communication and decision-making by parents and physicians, the Institute of Medicine’s Vaccine Safety Forum convened a workshop to discuss risk communication. This article summarizes the workshop’s discussions; a more complete report1 is available on the World Wide Web at www2.nas.edu/hpdp/. Health risk communication has traditionally consisted of messages designed to encourage behavior that reduces individual and societal risk (e.g., smoking cessation and seat-belt use).2 Increasingly, risk communication is seen as an interactive process of an exchange of information and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions.3 To be effective, risk communications must address the experiences, beliefs, values, and attitudes of message recipients as well as providers. Understanding how risks are perceived and the inherent biases of both message providers and recipients is key to good risk communication.4 Although health risk communication has been an active research area for several decades, the science and practice of vaccine risk communication are not yet well developed. Many of the problems with risk communication in general, however, apply to vaccine risks.5 Recent studies illustrate specific factors influencing how vaccine risks and benefits are perceived by and acted on by consumers and vaccine providers. Individuals’ immunization decisions, for instance, are influenced by decisions that others make. People might prefer to do what a majority of others do or may take advantage of the protection afforded by high immunization rates and not be vaccinated; they may also be influenced to vaccinate by the fact that vaccination would protect others. Other factors include perceptions of disease risk and the ability to control those risks, and preferences for the risks of diseases per se over risks of the vaccine against them. In particular, the rarity of vaccinepreventable diseases in the vaccine era makes it more difficult to communicate the risks of these diseases. Information on vaccine benefits and risks is currently limited in availability and scope. Information available to consumers today includes the vaccine information statements (VIS) issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), material from other federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), manufacturers’ package inserts that accompany vaccines, oral communications from health care providers, and information provided by a variety of nonprofit and consumer organizations. Three major themes emerged during the workshop. First, risk communication is a dynamic process in which many participate, and these individuals are influenced by a wide range of circumstances, interests, and information needs. Effective risk communication depends on the providers’ and recipients’ understanding more than simply the risks and benefits; background experiences and values also influence the process. Good risk communication recognizes a diversity of form and content needs in the general population. Both the method and content of risk communication should reflect the goals of the communication, which could include advocacy, education, and development of a decision-making partnership (in any combination). To be effective, it was suggested, risk communication about vaccines needs to take into account what people already know or believe about the risks and benefits associated with immunization. Vaccine risk communicators should consider the varied information needs of the audience. Some recipients of risk communication material prefer short, simple messages that explain the risks and benefits of vaccines in nontechnical language; others want as much scientific information as is available. Currently, the primary sources of consumer information on vaccines are criticized either as being too simplistic and incomplete (the VISs, for instance) or having too much technical information for some people to understand and process effectively (for example, From the Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC 20418 Address Correspondence to: Michael A. Stoto, Institute of Medicine, 2101 Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington, DC 20418