Enhancing warnings
This report offers insights into what warnings are and how they can better support actions for effective behavioural preparedness and responses across a wide range of hazards, stakeholders, and sectors. Warnings are not just a siren or phone alert but should be a long-term social process that is a carefully crafted, integrated system of preparedness involving vulnerability analysis and reduction, hazard monitoring and forecasting, disaster risk assessment, and communication. Together, these activities enable a wide range of leaders and others – such as individuals, local groups, governments, and businesses – to take timely and effective action to reduce disaster risks in advance of hazards.
This report finds that whilst the UK has developed robust warnings, they frequently fail because people do not act or act ineffectively. The key characteristics of effective warnings need to be implemented alongside mechanisms for knowledge retention and exchange, particularly given that organisational staff often have a high turnover. Education is continual, especially regarding engagement between those with information and authority and the users. With complex, multi-hazard and/or cascading hazards and threats, warnings must engage directly with people affected, often looking to and supporting them for leadership.
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