Making Ends Meet: How Communities Can Use Risk Assessment Results

See PowerPoint presentations from the Making End Meet Session at the Understanding Risk Conference HERE.

Session Overview: Today, text messages, tweets, iphone apps, and facebook updates, not to mention 24-hour cable news cycles and countless other mechanisms, deliver information to people in the critical times during and after a disaster occurs. Twenty-first century technology allows for disaster-related risks to be identified, assessed, and communicated through satellites, the internet, and mobile devices. These technological innovations in risk identification and risk assessment advance the rate, quantity, and maybe even the quality of information that is transmitted and received during times of disasters. The question that this session, Making Ends Meet, poses is, "so what?"

For decades, scientists have investigated how people behave when they receive information about how they may be at risk.

Questions we want to address: Some older technologies did not trigger changes in human behavior, so how can we understand how the new, 21st-century technologies may have a different, more positive effect? The overarching questions posed for this session are whether these 21st-century technologies are or will be the game changers they promise to be and what is needed to translate these risk assessment technologies into behavior that increases the resilience of communities and reduces human suffering and loss of life during disasters.

We, the Disasters Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences, welcome you to join this discussion and share ideas for how to facilitate, mobilize, and implement ways to make ends meet between the 21st-century technologies for risk identification and risk assessment and the timeless desires of communities to be resilient to disasters.