In search of unifying concepts for understanding and responding to disasters

The urgent and unexpected nature of any disaster creates challenging communication needs and constraints. In some disasters, effective crisis communication responses can result in reduced or avoided risk, and thus harm, to potentially-affected populations. Strategic communication also can address complex psychosocial responses and needs that continue to develop and persist beyond initial recognition and occurrence of a disaster and among those most directly affected by it. Although varied types of disasters, and the crises resulting from them, are inevitable, strategic communication responses can help manage and resolve those crises and facilitate learning strategies for better managing and/or avoiding similar crises associated with such disasters more effectively in the future. This speaker, an expert on crisis communication, will apply the crisis communication literature to disasters and identify potentially unifying communication concepts for understanding and responding to them, as well as current gaps and limitations in the literature as it applies to varied types of disasters.