Enhancing warnings

This report by Dr Carina Fearnley and Professor Ilan Kelman from the UCL Warning Research Centre 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.

The full report, commissioned by the National Preparedness Commission, can be found here. A press release associated with the launch of the report can be found here. 

Warnings are part of our everyday life, whether traffic lights, food health warnings, the weather, advice from colleagues, or moralistic stories. Warnings serve to provide cautionary advice, give advance notice of something, and generate awareness to trigger consequent decisions and actions. Warnings are seldom considered beyond the issuance of a warning, yet warnings are far more complex, requiring a comprehensive tool and system to help implement preventative, mitigative, and disaster risk-reductive actions.

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. Warnings are represented via different iconographies and communicated via different mediums that usually express some form of threshold or tipping point. These vary enormously contingent on the hazard, and social, political, and economic context of the warning.

Warnings should provide actionable guidance that is integrated into everyday life and behaviour, providing transparency and credibility to help manage risk in emerging and ongoing situations. Warnings must operate beyond the silos frequently seen in institutions, for different vulnerabilities, different hazards, and different stakeholders to become a long-term social process that can serve to bring together these diverse issues. This report examines how this can be implemented providing key case-study examples of lessons learnt and guidance on how to build effective warning systems.

To enhance a warning requires placing it as part of a warning system, a long-term social process that embodies the 3 I’s ( Imagination, Initiative, Integration) and 3 E’s (Education, Exchange, Engagement). '

The authors offer three recommendations and provide guidance on how to implement these recommendations:

1. Develop effective warnings that consider multiple-hazards, cascading
   events, and integration across stakeholders.
2.  Adopt a public engagement and outreach programme that empowers people to identify and fulfil their own needs regarding warnings for enhancing preparedness and response behaviours and actions.
3. Create and support mechanisms to overcome silos and territorialism
   and instead encourage idea and action exchange for building trust and
   connections that support action when a major situation arises.