9/11. Tornadoes. Emergency preparedness. Whether explaining parts per million to a community exposed to contaminated groundwater or launching a campaign to encourage home carbon monoxide testing, an effective message is paramount to the desired result: an increased understanding of health risk.   Communicating Environmental Risk in Multiethnic Communities is the first book to address the theory and practice of disseminating disaster warnings and hazard education messages to multiethnic communities. Authors Michael K. Lindell and Ronald W. Perry introduce theory-based reasoning as a basis for understanding warning dissemination and public education, devoting specific attention to the community context of emergency warning delivery and response. Through these principles of human behavior, readers can apply risk communication information to virtually any specific disaster agent with which they may be concerned.   This volume is recommended for practitioners in private emergency management and federal, state, and local governments, as well as students studying risk communication, health communication, emergency management, and environmental policy and management.   

Hazard Awareness as Risk Communication

Hazard awareness as risk communication

According to Burton and colleagues (1978, 1993), hazard adjustments are actions that either intentionally or incidentally reduce risk from extreme events in the natural environment. Thus, evacuation and sheltering in-place in response to disaster warnings can be thought of as hazard adjustments, but the term hazard adjustments is more frequently applied to long-term risk reduction actions such as hazard mitigation, emergency preparedness, or recovery preparedness. Hazard mitigation refers to actions taken previously that provide passive protection to people and property at the time of disaster impact. For example, as noted in Chapter 1, to avoid the impacts of floods, communities can restrict construction to areas outside the flood-plain or elevate structures above projected high water marks. ...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles