Book Review: Disaster Education, Communication and Engagement

One of the characteristics of a sustainable society is its resilience to disasters. Communities may fail to respond to disasters due to their limited resources and capacities which are necessary to cope with the situation. Catastrophic floods in Europe in summer 2021 or extreme weather events and wildfire in the USA and Canada in 2021 are recent examples.These disasters cause various human, economic and environmental damages.As such, disasters have been mentioned in different items of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including: SDG # 4 (healthy lives), SDG # 11 (resilient cities), and SDG # 9 (resilient infrastructure). Specifically in Objective 11.5 it is emphasized that “By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially reduce the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations.”To reach this goal, it is important to increase the global attention to each of the elements of disaster management ((i.e., mitigation, preparedness, response, and rehabilitation/recovery). Unfortunately especially disaster preparedness is a less discussed topic both in academic literature as well as in practice. Disaster preparedness depends on many factors such as risk perception, risk severity perception, and self-efficacy. Public preparedness for disasters is an important duty for relevant actors, including the government.