The effectiveness of hazard risk communication ℃ expert and community perspective on Orewa in Auckland, New Zealand

Bapon Fakhruddin (University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand)
Jassodra Kuizon (University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand)
Craig Glover (Auckland Council, Auckland, New Zealand)

Emerald Open Research

ISSN: 2631-3952

Article publication date: 21 August 2020

Issue publication date: 22 December 2023

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Abstract

Hazard risk communication has arguably been a challenge, especially in communities which are susceptible to multiple hazards. Orewa was specially chosen for this research in order to provide a complete assessment of the effectiveness of communicating New Zealand's early warning strategy in a multi-hazard area. Two categories of surveys were undertaken; experts and academics in emergency management and disaster risk resilience and the Orewa community. A semi-qualitative indicator-based analysis was conducted with the normalization of index values which resulted in four (4) categories; risk perception, risk awareness, risk governance and uncertainty, trust and credibility. The resulting vulnerability index indicated that risk perception and uncertainty, trust and credibility ranked the highest, followed by risk awareness and risk governance. Risk perception had stark differences between what the community perceives as being most at risk from to what the experts deem to be the highest risk for Orewa. This has implications for policy directives as well as funding for risk reduction. Uncertainty, trust and credibility was another area which indicated conflicting sentiments between the community and experts. The community generally trusts decision-makers but the experts think they don't. This shows that the community is aware of their risks, but may not necessarily believe that the experts are providing enough efforts in what is of importance to them. Risk governance is not a vulnerable area to the experts as they have been actively engaging in hazards that they deem Orewa was most at risk from. Any breakdown in communication can have detrimental effects if multiple hazards were to occur at once in the case of Orewa.

Keywords

Citation

Fakhruddin, B., Kuizon, J. and Glover, C. (2023), "The effectiveness of hazard risk communication ℃ expert and community perspective on Orewa in Auckland, New Zealand", Emerald Open Research, Vol. 1 No. 13. https://doi.org/10.1108/EOR-13-2023-0003

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020 Fakhruddin, B. et al.

License

This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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