Collaborative Community Weather Information

Abstract

Weather and hydrological information have rapidly improved with developments in science and technology, but community engagement with disaster prevention has been declining gradually. The relationship between available information and community engagement can be separated into issues of an overdependence on information or an attitude of waiting for more information by recipients of weather and hydrological information. To resolve these issues and construct a new relationship between the providers of information and users, we discuss collaborative community weather information (CCWI), a new approach to weather and hydrological information created by promoting risk communication among various stakeholders, including residents. Since July 2014, the author has been undertaking practical research on CCWI in the Nakajima School District in Japan. We consider the effects and future vision of CCWI through a case study in which three CCWI systems were created through collaboration with the Nakajima local government, weather office, river manager, community council, residents, and researchers. We have observed the operation of the Nakajima CCWI system and report our findings in this chapter. We conclude that CCWI can facilitate better risk communication in disasters as collaboration between providers of meteorological information and local recipients of risk information.