The community characteristics of a specific group decide on what they understand of the disaster communications sent to them and how they react to different kinds and levels of warnings. This defines the community's comprehensive needs for disaster information. These needs have to be assessed in terms of contents, presentation format and dissemination mechanism. Without this, advances in the fields of Remote Sensing and GIS would fail to yield results in terms of reduced damages form disasters, particularly in transitional economies.
The paper looks at the need to identify parameters influencing community perceptions of disaster information, and to assess information needs of economically weaker communities vulnerable to floods in Delhi. It draws upon experiences from a technology development and research project on urban risk reduction in India.
Disaster information
With the advancements in the area of disaster forecasting, and availability of modern satellite and computer technology, sufficient information is now available regarding approaching cyclones, impending floods and droughts, spreading fires, and to a limited extent even oncoming earthquakes, which can be usefully disseminated through the communication means available to us. However, there is a vast gap between information available with scientists, and information that reaches the user communities.There are a number of reasons for this:
- The entire range of information available is not of direct use to the community. As such, the scientists decide on what and how much is to be shared with the public. Often the message that finally reaches the public is oversimplified and holds no useful information.
- The information needs to different community groups differ with their varying characteristics, and the universal message issued by the authorities usually contains only part of the information needed, and may contain extra information, which is not required.
- The language and format of presentation of the information is standardized, and fails to meet specific comprehension needs of small community groups.
Parameters influencing community perceptions
The communication needs of different target community groups with respect to warnings and disaster information are based on a number of parameters. Besides depending on technical factors such as intensity of expected hazard event, and level of vulnerability of the communities, they are also influenced by the inherent characteristics of the communities groups affecting their perceptions and educations, such as economic status, gender, age, education level, social structure, linguistic background, accessibility and physical setting, and exposure t warnings and disaster events.
These parameters, couples with composition of communities in terms of constituent sub groups, define the perceptional range of specific communities, and the needs to be met by disaster communication system in general, and early warnings in particular.
Urban disasters and communication needs
The damages in urban areas due to discharging trend over the past decades. This is primarily because, with increasing economic attractors in urban areas and resultant population pressures, more and more people are occupying vulnerable parcels of land that had been left undeveloped hitherto. The response of the governments and the disaster management community is to stress on betterment of forecasting and warning systems for reducing disasters, and as a result, better weather forecasting satellites with higher resolutions are launched every year, and faster and more efficient super computers are commissioned to the task of providing more advanced and accurate forecasts.
However, the reasons for increasing damages in spite of timely forecasts lies not in forecasting and warning technology, but elsewhere. It lies with the last link of warning dissemination, the community link, which is either totally missing, or ground, accessibility and physical setting, and exposure to warnings and disaster events.
These parameters, coupled with composition of communities in terms of constituent sub groups, define the perceptional range of specific communities, and the needs to be met by disaster communication systems in general, and early warnings in particular.