Participatory information management for sustainable disaster risk reduction

Abstract

Disasters can result if the risk information, for example in the form of early warning, does not reach the people at risk in time (Pelling, 2003). This is true for both natural and anthropogenic disasters. One example to highlight the importance of communicating risk information in time is the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 where a lapse in communicating the tsunami risk warning to India and Sri Lanka allegedly occurred despite the technology and knowhow existed with the U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the Japan Meteorological Agency to give a 2-hour advance warning (Goliath, 2005; Zubair, 2005). In this case, getting the advanced early warning could have saved half of the lives lost. Another example comes from even more recent Mumbai, India terror attacks where the available intelligence could not stop the terror attacks from happening in November 2008 (Deccan Herald, 2005). While these two examples clearly show the importance of disseminating right information to right people at the larger scale, there also exist examples of such failures at the local level. Such failures were often reported in communicating the cyclone early warning to the remote coastal areas (The Hindu, 2000). The contiguous information continuum from the national level to individual level is essential for an efficient transfer of information and risk reduction. Sometimes the information failure occurs due to the lack of trust on the information source on the part of those who receive the information leading to poor response (Leon et al., 2006). This shows that there is a need for a paradigm shift in the way information is generated and disseminated among various stakeholders such that the credibility of the risk information is high leading to effective response and risk reduction. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.