Community and individual disaster resilience for floods : options for improving protective action guidance / Rachel Steratore, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Shoshana R. Shelton [and 3 others].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steratore, Rachel Dryden, author.

Clark-Ginsberg, Aaron, author.

Shelton, Shoshana R., author.

Contributor:

United States. Department of Homeland Security. Science and Technology Directorate.

Rand Corporation. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Floods--Risk assessment--United States.

Floods.

Risk communication--United States.

Risk communication.

Emergency management--United States.

Emergency management.

United States.

Other Title:

Community and Individual Disaster Resilience for Floods

Place of Publication:

RAND Corporation 2023

Summary:

Effective risk communication is necessary to reduce the billions of dollars in damage and hundreds of fatalities that occur yearly from floods in the United States. The purpose of this report is to help Department of Homeland Security officials identify ways to improve protective action flood guidance in response to growing flood risks that continue to cause adverse effects and threaten lives and property. Drawing on a review of academic and grey literature, authors used a conceptual framework, which was operationalized to review Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s flood protective action guidance through the lens of a social-ecological model—comprising individual, relationship, community, and societal factors. Authors then took a broader look at risk communication best practices to collect principles that could help improve the effectiveness of flood risk communication, and developed recommendations for implementation. This study resulted in key findings and related recommendations that should help FEMA improve its flood communication strategy and messaging. First, components of the social-ecological model can be used to understand how people respond to protective action guidance and to develop a communication strategy tailored to the needs of the target audience. Second, partnering with the community can improve communication, which requires a reciprocal relationship between the organization seeking to communicate and the intended audience. Third, establishing flood messaging standards, including general readability, can help build an understanding of how messages might interact and be received by different audiences and can guide the development of messages that are more likely to result in protective action.

Contents:

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Existing Landscape of Flood Risk Communication

Chapter Three: Review of FEMA's Flood Protective Action Guidance to Inform Future Targeted Messaging

Chapter Four: Improvements to FEMA Flood Communication to Enhance Protective Action, Equity, and Efficiency

Appendix A: Methodology

Appendix B: Assessments.