A model for communication and management support of natural hazards risk

Abstract

Natural disasters are still quite frequent throughout Europe but rare at a given site. As a result, the stakeholders responsible for mitigating natural hazard risk often have false perceptions about the risks, which tend to slow the development of management plans and owner actions to increase natural hazard resilience. To address this issue, this paper introduces a model for communication and management support of natural hazards risk to stakeholders, who are often non-experts in the field. The model incorporates a seven-grade scale consistent with European labelling of product energy consumption. However, the proposed implementation also includes a systematic distinction between long-term and short-term risk tolerance, enabling the introduction of a time-dependent grade reduction in cases where the estimated risk is intolerable in the long term. This approach helps improve stakeholders' perception of natural hazards risk while incentivising actions that help reduce that risk. The gradual reduction of grades over time enables systematically introducing increasingly detrimental actions if the risk is long-term intolerable, thus strengthening the risk management process.