•   Monitoring
•   Forecasting
•   Action & Mitigation
•   ICT & Organisation

SELF-HELP CAPACITY DURING FLOODS

Helping civilians to help themselves more during flood alerts and actual floods. That is the aim of this project. The assumption is that civilians themselves are in the best position to decide how to prepare. However, in that case, the government must provide the right information about threats, measures and consequences.

In concrete terms, this project looks at the link between self-help capacity and risk and crisis communications, answering the question of how best to inform the public when there are impending and acute dangers. The factors taken into account here include the dynamics of the situation and a range of psychological aspects.

Group discussions with the public will be used to test the effect of specially developed communications. Those communications will also be submitted to the residents of the research areas in a field study. The impact on behaviour will be determined by means of simulations using evacuation models.

Finally, a demonstration will be developed that, on the basis of the threat and the government's selected strategy, will select basic tailored messages. Those messages will then be translated by communications experts into location-dependent messages that will be distributed to cell phones and websites.

Sub-projects:

• Link between risk and crisis communications and self-help capacityTesting, validation and impact determination
• Development of demonstration of link with FLIWAS and range of basic messages