Connecting Science and Society: Advancing Disaster and Climate Risk Communication for Resilience

Effective communication of disaster and climate risks is pivotal to enhancing resilience and reducing vulnerabilities, especially as natural hazards become more frequent and severe due to climate change. The scientific community, policymakers, and practitioners agree that timely, accurate, and contextually appropriate communication can save lives, protect livelihoods, and support sustainable recovery. The Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative, led by WMO, UNDRR, ITU, and IFRC, identifies enhanced communication of climate-related hazards as a key pillar, alongside risk knowledge, monitoring, and preparedness, to strengthen global resilience by end-2027. However, despite advances in technology and modeling, challenges persist in translating weather and climate information into actionable knowledge that reaches and empowers diverse populations, particularly in marginalised and resource-constrained settings.

This Research Topic aims to foster a deeper, multidisciplinary understanding of the complex dynamics shaping disaster and climate risk communication worldwide. By bringing together cutting-edge research and applied insights, it seeks to illuminate the diverse challenges, such as reaching marginalised populations and translating scientific knowledge into actionable information, as well as promising mechanisms that underpin effective communication before, during, and after disasters. In doing so, this Research Topic supports the UN commitment to Early Warnings for All, helping to advance more equitable and effective global resilience efforts.

The Research Topic welcomes contributions from researchers and practitioners worldwide, with a special emphasis on voices from the Global South. Given the disproportionate impacts of climate and disaster risks on developing regions, it is essential to center local realities and knowledge systems as well as highlight the innovations emerging from these contexts.

Key thematic areas include, but are not limited to:

• Challenges and innovations in disaster and climate risk communication: exploring barriers such as infrastructural constraints, misinformation, language diversity, and trust deficits, as well as novel strategies leveraging technology, participatory approaches, community-based early warning, and social networks.
• The role of weather and climate information: examining how forecasts, early warning systems, and climate projections are produced, interpreted, and disseminated, and their influence on decision-making at individual, community, and institutional levels.
• Intersectional dimensions of communication: investigating how gender, disability, broader inequalities, and power relations affect access to information, risk perception, and adaptive behaviors, and how communication strategies can be designed to be gender-responsive and inclusive to inform more effective, tailored communication strategies.
• Local and Indigenous knowledge integration: highlighting the importance of incorporating community-based and traditional knowledge systems to enhance relevance, cultural sensitivity, and trust in communication efforts and early warning systems.
• Contextualizing communication strategies: emphasizing the need to tailor messages to local social, cultural, economic, and political contexts, and individual needs based on intersectional identities, to improve uptake and actionability.

Information and Instructions for Authors

You are welcome to submit a full paper on or before 30 June, but if you wish, you can also submit your manuscript summary (Frontiers' name for extended abstract) for Guest Editor review prior to full paper submission. You can do so using the “Submit” button at the top right of the screen, and include the following:

• Title and author information: a tentative title of your manuscript and author names, affiliations, and contact details.
• Manuscript summary: brief context or background information that sets up the research problem or topic, as well as potential aims, objectives, and/or research questions guiding the study. If available, do include an indication of the research methodology, including data sources, study design, and analytical techniques, and highlight any key results or discoveries from the research. Your interpretation of the findings, if possible, and/or potential implications or recommendations, could round out this summary.
• Literature references (optional but recommended): include a few key references to situate the work within the existing literature.
• The article type that you intend to contribute.
• Keywords: please list up to 5 keywords that may be associated with your manuiscript.
• Word count: we recommend a manuscript summary of 1,000-1,500 words (max. 2,000 words).

This Research Topic accepts any of the article types listed below, except Editorial (Editorials are submitted exclusively by the Topic Editors).

For all inquiries on this Research Topic, please contact Dr Denyse S Dookie d.dookie@lse.ac.uk.

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Topic Editor Dr Katharine Vincent is employed by Kulima Integrated Development Solutions Pty Ltd. The other Topic Editors report no competing interests related to this Research Topic.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: disaster risk communication, climate risk communication, resilience and vulnerability, local and indigenous knowledge, early warning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.