UW-UBC Collaborative Workshop

"Communicating Changing Risk"

Stephanie Chang, Ann Bostrom (organizers) and Abbie Wen (facilitator) 

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Abstract: Risk has an inherent temporal dimension that sometimes gets overlooked. Of course, warning systems are explicit about the time available for action, but they generally don’t address explicitly how risk itself might change. In the short term, risk could shift because of people’s actions (e.g., evacuation), damage in a first event (e.g., an earthquake that weakens buildings before an aftershock), etc. Then toward the other end of the temporal spectrum, there’s communicating risk related to climate change, as well as long-term shifts in risk due to urban development, etc. – not to mention communicating how risk might change if different types of actions are undertaken (e.g., different land-use scenarios). Communicating changing risks can also affect and be affected by how people perceive different decision and risk analysis methods and models. Shifting risk is something that the COVID-19 pandemic, with all the issues of variants and vaccines, has brought to the fore.  What challenges and successes characterize recent and current efforts to communicate changing risk?  What research is needed to advance our understanding of risk communication for changing risks?