Scope

Disaster Communications aim to cover research which deals with communications and responses to natural and other types of disasters such as earthquake, tsunami and flood response, urban and bushfire communications, response to bio related threats, terrorism, food, animal and public health disease outbreak responses, and other types of disasters which requires multi jurisdictional coordinated responses. Communication is considered to be a major challenge among the individuals, groups and agencies that respond to disasters. We are increasingly seeing a delay and disconnect of the transmission of locally situated information to the hierarchical system to make the overall preparedness and response more proactive rather than reactive for dealing with Complex Emergencies (i.e., Flood and Tsunami, Fire, Natural disaster, Disaster Medicine, Bio-security, Terrorism). One approach could be to develop infrastructure and support systems by developing both formal and informal education and learning platform. This is aimed at bringing the formal and community based ad hoc networks together required for facilitating the transmission of both strong (i.e. infections, confirmed cases, deaths in hospital or clinic settings) and weak alters from the community for making the overall surveillance and intervention strategy far more effective. The rapid activation of appropriate social networks, including significant local participation and the transfer, use, and quality of shared information about risks, vulnerabilities, and hazards to the affected communities is critical to the effective communications during disaster response efforts. These networks—comprising multiple, loosely linked organizations or ad-hoc networks—can play a complementary role in communicating with the affected population during disaster situations. The section aims to cover critical discussions, theoretical and empirical generalizations of disaster communications problem across agriculture, public health, natural and built environment, animal health, national and natural security, food, fire, disease, terrorism as well as bio security related disasters. The motivation here is to bring different types of disaster communication issues in a single academic forum. The intellectual debate in disaster communications across different disciplines and practice areas needs to be integrated in single forum which could lead to major advancement of sharing and improving lessons learned activities holistically. This could also lead to creating a single repository for sharing and learning about the best practices in disaster communications across different disciplines. The outstanding features of this section would be to provide a single avenue for academics and practitioners to discuss critical issues related to disaster communications across different disciplines and practice such as flood and tsunami related disaster communications, earthquake, urban and bushfire, disease outbreaks, bio related disaster, and terrorism.

Submission

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