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The impact of disasters continues to grow in the early 21st century, as extreme weather events become more frequent and population density in vulnerable coastal and inland cities increases. Against this backdrop of risk, decision-makers persist in focusing primarily on structural measures to reduce losses centered on physical infrastructure such as berms, seawalls, retrofitted buildings, and levees. Yet a growing body of research emphasizes that strengthening social infrastructure, not just physical infrastructure, serves as a cost-effective way to improve the ability of communities to withstand and rebound from disasters. Three distinct kinds of social connections, including bonding, bridging, and linking social ties, support resilience through increasing the provision of emergency information, mutual aid, and collective action within communities to address natural hazards before, during, and after disaster events. Investing in social capital fosters community resilience that transcends natural hazards and positively affects collective governance and community health. Social capital has a long history in social science research and scholarship, particularly in how it has grown within various disciplines. Broadly, the term describes how social ties generate norms of reciprocity and trust, allow collective action, build solidarity, and foster information and resource flows among people. From education to crime, social capital has been shown to have positive impacts on individual and community outcomes, and research in natural hazards has similarly shown positive outcomes for individual and community resilience. Social capital also can foster negative outcomes, including exclusionary practices, corruption, and increased inequality. Understanding which types of social capital are most useful for increasing resilience is important to move the natural hazards field forward. Many questions about social capital and natural hazards remain, at best, partially answered. Do different types of social capital matter at different stages of disaster—e.g., mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery? How do social capital’s effects vary across cultural contexts and stratified groups? What measures of social capital are available to practitioners and scholars? What actions are available to decision-makers seeking to invest in the social infrastructure of communities vulnerable to natural hazards? Which programs and interventions have shown merit through field tests? What outcomes can decision-makers anticipate with these investments? Where can scholars find data sets on resilience and social capital? The current state of knowledge about social capital in disaster resilience provides guidance about supporting communities toward more resilience.

Charting gender within international law on disasters is a twofold exercise: The first, more limited, inquiry concerns the development of regulations on disasters and disaster risk and the position of gender within these instruments. The second, more foundational, question is that of the position of gender and the space allowed for feminist and queer perspectives within international law itself, which, in turn, relates strongly to the root causes of disasters and the creation of disaster risk. References to a “gender-based” approach to disaster risk management are abundant in international law and policy instruments and can be seen in, for example, both the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (Sendai Framework) and the International Law Commission’s (ILC) 2016 Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters (ILC Draft Articles)—two leading international law and policy instruments on disasters. However, neither of these instruments accounts for a particularly inclusive view of gender, nor do they engage with the underlying reasons for gender inequality. This is illustrative of broader issues concerning gender in international law and policy, and many of the challenges and shortcomings of international law and policy on disasters are inherent and (re)produced in the very fabric of the international legal system. Therefore, in addition to exploring the extent to which gender has been incorporated into the legal frameworks on disasters to date, it is essential to also critically explore core structures and practices of international law.

The frequency and complexity of hazard occurrences in rural and urban Zimbabwe has made the governance discourse fashionable in efforts to mitigate the devastating effects in contemporary settings. So common is the reactive attitude at national and subnational levels that hazard governance has been made inescapable in aligning with the notion that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” through design and implementation of context specific interventions. The 1992 drought is one unforgettable occurrence which triggered a plethora of actions such as dam construction, irrigation development, and the establishment of agricultural banks to support recovery initiatives in Zimbabwe. Strides to embrace the role of science and technology are evident through the establishment of research and academic institutions to anchor disaster risk management. Despite these efforts, vulnerable groups, government institutions, NGOs, and donors have invested less than in the predisaster phase.

From 1976 to 2023, disaster studies experienced a revolution in the way scholars think about natural hazards and disasters. Central to this transformation was the emergence of vulnerability theory, which defines disasters as processes that unfold over long periods because of human practices that enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of natural hazards. For researchers involved in developing this analytical perspective, the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala stands out as a prime example of the role of social forces in engendering disaster. Beyond the 1976 earthquake, a review of Guatemala’s history of disasters illuminates the intimate relationship between development practices, socioeconomic inequity, and catastrophes from the pre-Columbian period to the early 21st century. Paralleling the rise of vulnerability theory in the 1970s was the growing interest of disaster scholars in the methodological potential of catastrophes to reveal social structures (e.g., kinship organization) and fault lines (e.g., class and racial structures) that are not readily apparent in times of “normalcy.” Moreover, this interest in the revelatory qualities of disasters was accompanied by a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between disasters and social change. Once again, Guatemala has offered a number of case studies that illustrate how disasters allow researchers to see social structures, inequities, and contradictions and have shed light on why some disasters are conducive to progressive social change while others are not. Specifically, the case of Guatemala demands social scientists understand disaster vulnerability and the transformative potential of disasters within the broader global political–economic networks of colonial and postcolonial extraction and exploitation. As the 21st century progresses, Guatemala struggles with the local particularities of global disasters. Central America is the tropical region that stands to be most affected by anthropogenic climate change, yet the country’s national government has not implemented the hazard mitigation, urban planning, and inequity reduction programs necessary to counteract these effects. From 2015 to 2023, climate change–related droughts and floods displaced thousands of subsistence farmers, many of whom chose to migrate internationally in search of better livelihoods. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted a country with a fragmented and critically underfunded health care system and deeply entrenched inequities between urban and rural and Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. As a result, Guatemala’s excess mortality rate during the most acute years of the pandemic (2020 and 2021) more than doubled that of Costa Rica, the Central American nation that was best prepared to confront the global health crisis. Despite the notable role of the 1976 earthquake as a classic example of vulnerability theory and the role disasters have played in inciting socio-political upheavals and change, disaster social science research and disaster risk reduction remain poorly developed in Guatemala.

Despite myriad descriptions and indicators used to define a fragile state, the international community has come to an agreement that a fragile state lacks the ability to maintain physical control of its territorial boundaries, provide basic public services, facilitate economic growth, and interact as a full member of the international community. Fragile states have historically experienced a disproportionate amount of natural disaster-related losses. For example, from 2005 to 2009, more than 50% of those impacted by a natural disaster lived in a fragile state, resulting in over $200 billion in losses. When natural disasters occur in such areas, they exacerbate already weak governance structures and further undermine their governments’ capability to respond to the crisis while simultaneously addressing challenges related to poverty and conflict. To remedy these and other complex issues inherent in fragile states, scholars are beginning to recognize the importance of investigating how fragile states can mitigate natural disaster losses through effective agency coordination and cross-sector collaboration. Agency coordination, in the context of natural disaster response, refers to the integration of facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication by public agencies for supporting incident response activities. Cross-sector collaboration refers to the sharing of information and resources by organizations in two or more sectors to achieve an outcome that cannot be produced by organizations in one sector alone. Because forecasts suggest that natural disaster-related losses will only increase in fragile states owing to population growth, urbanization, and climate change, there is a pressing need to understand the ways public organizations not only coordinate before, during, and after a natural disaster, but also how they collaborate across organizational sectors.

Natural disasters pose a significant and rapidly growing burden to society, causing over a million deaths and worldwide economic losses in the trillions of dollars in the last twenty years. Concerned over the extent to which their populations are exposed to disaster risk, policymakers in disaster-prone countries strive to increase the penetration of disaster insurance from its relatively low current level and wish to arrest the increasing share of public liability for private losses arising from rising public expenditures on disaster recovery. Although evidence regarding disaster risk and insurance suggests that individuals respond to their economic incentives when deciding on the degree to which to expose their property and other to risk from a recurrent disaster, potential inefficiencies in private insurance markets can distort these individual incentives and result in underinsurance and excessive exposure. Current research into whether such apparent market inefficiencies are primarily attributed to the behavior of private market participants or to the adverse incentives arising from current programs of disaster aid, regulation and other public policies is of fundamental importance to attaining these policy objectives. This article critically assesses the current state of mainstream economic and political research into disasters, public policy, and household behavior toward disaster risk. Findings of the most important and influential empirical and theoretical studies over the last 30 years are described, as well as limits on the robustness and interpretation of these findings arising from the characteristics of economic data on disasters and potential bias in measuring the determinants of disaster insurance coverage. Also discussed are both theoretical and empirical evidence that moral hazard on the part of households, insurance firms, and elected officials results in misallocations of private coverage; and it is demonstrated that, exactly contrary to the objectives of public policy, current programs of disaster aid in the presence of moral hazard create incentives for households to minimize, rather than maximize, market coverage of their exposure to disaster risk. The conclusion presents and proves a proposition, original to this article, that any compensatory public aid program is necessarily a source of economic inefficiency and, conditional on net losses, decreases economic welfare.

Managing complexity requires appropriate governance structures and effective coordination, communication, and action within the incident response network. Governance structures serve as a framework to understand the interrelated relationships that exist during a crisis. Governance structures can be classified as either hierarchical and managed, autonomous and networked, or a hybrid of hierarchies and networks, and represent a continuum of crisis response systems. As such, effective crisis management is first a function of a leader’s ability to leverage hierarchical, hybrid, and network forms of crisis management governance to manage complex disasters. Second, it hinges on the proficiency of the disaster response network in managing distributed information, coordinating operations, and collaborating among jurisdictions. Combining these two points results in high-performing disaster response networks that operate fluidly between governing structures and across jurisdictions, thus increasing our national capacity to manage complex disasters.

Bureaucratic politics, discretion, and decision-making for natural hazards governance present an important challenge of the use of autonomous bureaucratic discretion in the absence of political accountability. Understanding how these factors influence discretion and policymaking is of critical importance for natural hazards because the extent to which bureaucrats are able to make decisions means that communities will be safer in the face of disaster. But the extent to which they are held accountable for their decisions has significant implications for public risk and safety. Bureaucrats are unelected and cannot be voted out of office. There are two significant areas that remain regarding the use of bureaucratic discretion in natural hazards policy. One key area is to consider the increasing emphasis on networked disaster governance on bureaucratic discretion and decision-making. The conventional wisdom is that networks facilitate disaster management much better than command and control approaches. However, the extent to which the use of bureaucratic discretion is important in the implementation of natural hazard policy, particularly for mitigation and preparedness, remains an open area of research. The other key area is the influence of bureaucratic discretion and decision-making when communities learn after a disaster. The political nature of disasters and the professional expertise of public service professionals imply that in order to make communities safer, bureaucrats will have to use discretion to push forward more aggressive mitigation and preparedness policies. Bureaucratic discretion would need to be used for both political and policy purposes in order to engage in policy learning after disasters that produces a substantive change.

Ghana faces a very low range of perennial natural hazards but high catastrophe due to the lack of proper planning and preparedness. Floods, drought/famine, landslides, fires, climate change, and sporadically earthquakes are some natural hazards that plague the tropical West African country, Ghana. Floods, the most common disaster in the country, cause epidemics of water-related diseases like cholera, typhoid, and malaria. The disaster governance in Ghana was mostly in a conventional ad hoc mode of response and relief-centric manner. However, since the early 21st century, understanding has grown on risk causes; therefore, the paradigm shift to prevention–mitigation and thus mainstreaming disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into development is forming an agenda in development governance. Legal and policy framework has given the mandate to some key institutions for policy guidelines, capacity development, and emergency response at national, regional, and local levels, although without implementation hitches. Disaster risk reduction in Ghana is spearheaded by the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), established in 1996. NADMO has been at the forefront of managing disasters in the country since its establishment, but due to the limited resources, it is seen to do more postdisaster management. Postdisaster management is the sharing of relief items and offering help, after disasters, to affected persons. Nonetheless, we have seen a tremendous increase in the management of disasters in Ghana.

Hazard management scholars have begun to develop an important line of inquiry based upon the idea of governance. This growing body of work focuses attention on how the hazard functions that were formerly carried out by public entities are now frequently dispersed among diverse sets of actors that include not only governmental institutions but also private-sector and civil society entities. While informative, this body of work is unduly narrow. In particular, it takes an actor-centric approach to the governance of hazards. A more comprehensive view would account for the relationship between the governance system and the underlying good being produced. Generally speaking, governance systems emerge to manage—or produce—particular goods. Accordingly, these systems will vary depending upon the nature of the underlying good. Thus, while it is important to describe the actors that shape the governance system—as the extant literature does— the failure to recognize or appreciate the relationship between hazards governance and its underlying good is non-trivial. At minimum, without this information scholars and practitioners cannot reasonably assess the efficacy of the system. To better understand hazards governance, there needs to be a clear picture of what the governance system is producing, as well as the defining characteristics thereof. The good being produced by hazards governance systems is resilience, which is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Simply stated, resilience can be conceptualized as a public good. Moreover, governance systems in general are comprised of multiple subsystems. In the case of hazards management, the subsystems are mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Thus, the production technologies—aggregate effort, single best effort, and weakest link—will likely vary across the hazards governance system. Showing how these technologies potentially vary across hazard governance systems opens new and important lines of inquiry.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) cover a wide range of telecommunication devices and applications, which facilitate the flow of information. Within crisis and disaster management, these devices and applications may be used explicitly for hazards or crisis detection, information management, communication, situational awareness, search and rescue efforts, and decision support systems. Everything from cell phones and social media to unmanned aerial vehicles and weather stations are used to collect, disseminate, and monitor various types of information and data to provide a common operating picture. ICTs are continually evolving, with new features developed and deployed at a rapid pace. This development has had a unique impact on crisis and disaster management, allowing for real-time communication and situational awareness, as well as novel approaches to simulations and training. With the near-ubiquitous use of some devices, information is also no longer held solely by government or private sector officials; ordinary citizens are also able to contribute to and disseminate information during and after crises. For some segments of the population, this ability to meaningfully contribute is not only empowering but necessary to highlight unmet needs. Throughout the evolution of ICTs, new research and practical concerns have highlighted persistent unmet needs of more vulnerable populations due to growing interdependence and integration across jurisdictional boundaries worldwide. The continued expansion of ICTs will most likely have a profound impact on this field in the future.

Storytelling is a common and pervasive practice across human history, which some have argued is a fundamental part of human understanding. Storytelling and narratives are a very human way of understanding the world, as well as events, and can serve as key tools for crisis and disaster studies and practice. They play a tremendously important role in planning, policy, education, the public sphere, advocacy, training, and community recovery. In the context of crises and disasters, stories are a means by which information is transmitted across generations, a key strategy for survival from non-routine and infrequent events. In fact, the field of disaster studies has long relied on narratives as primary source material, as a means of understanding individual experiences of phenomena as well as critiquing policies and understanding the role of history in 21st-century levels of vulnerability. Over the past several decades, practitioners and educators in the field have sought to use stories and narratives more purposefully to build resilience and pass on tacit knowledge.

Agenda setting is a crucial aspect of the public policy process. Sudden, rare, and harmful events, known as focusing events, can be important influences on the policy process. Such events can reveal current and potential future harms, mobilize people and groups to address the policy failures that may be revealed by such events, and open the “window of opportunity” for intensive policy discussion and potential policy change. But focusing events operate differently at different times and in different policy domains. Although the idea of focusing events is firmly rooted in Kingdon’s “streams approach” to the policy process, focusing events are an important element of most contemporary theories of the policy process. But not every event works as a focusing event. The process by which a focusing event can yield policy change is complex and involves attention to the problems revealed by the event as well as evidence of learning from the event on the part of policymakers. Although focusing events are important, in many ways the concept remains underdeveloped, with few researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of these important events.

Disproportionate policy response—which is composed of two core concepts, namely policy overreaction and under-reaction—is typically understood to be a lack of “fit” or balance between the costs of a public policy and the benefits deriving from this policy and/or between a policy’s ends and means. The disproportionate policy perspective introduces an intentional component into disproportionate response. It represents a conceptual turn whereby the concepts of policy overreaction and under-reaction are reentering the policy lexicon as types of intentional policy responses that are largely undertaken when political executives are vulnerable to voters. In times of crisis, disproportionate policy responses may be intentionally designed, implemented as planned, and sometimes successful in achieving policy goals and in delivering the political benefits sought by the political executives who design them. The premise underlying this argument is that crises vary in many respects, some of which may incentivize a deliberate crisis response by political executives that is either excessive, or lacking. For example, when crises occur at times of electoral vulnerability, the relevancy of policy instruments’ visibility, theatricality, spectacularity, and popularity may dominate the calculus of crisis management decisions. The same applies in cases where strong negative emotions emerge, and subsequently, political executives may opt to overwhelm hysterical populations cognitively and emotionally, trying to convince them that the policy system is viable.

Recent research shows that hurricanes, tropical storms, and flooding are likely to increase in quantity and intensity. Yet, despite the frequency of these hazards, there is little work that documents the relationship between disasters, low-income communities of color, and schooling. There is a dearth of literature documenting how these communities in high-impacted areas are affected, recover, and remain resilient following a storm.

Along with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean is among the geographic regions most exposed and vulnerable to the occurrence of disasters. The vulnerability is explained by geography and climate, but also by prevailing poverty and inequality. Year after year, multiple disasters such as landslides, hurricanes, floods, rains, droughts, storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, among others, threaten the region. Natural disasters reveal the deficiencies of infrastructure and essential services. In particular, they highlight the lack of an institutional framework for effective governance with clearly defined goals of how to prevent, respond to, and reconstruct after a natural catastrophe. One of the priorities of governments in the region is to achieve resilience—that is, to strengthen the capacity to resist, adapt, and recover from the effects of natural disasters. To be able to accomplish this, governments need to prepare before a natural disaster strikes. Therefore, disaster risk management is critical. A fundamental element in the strategy of increasing resilience is good planning in general—that is, to reduce inequality, manage urbanization, and invest in necessary infrastructure such as energy, sewage, and water management. Because climate change increases the risk of disasters, it is generally understood that good governance practices can prevent further global warming. Governments might achieve this, for example, by investing in renewable energy and financing other environmentally friendly initiatives. Unfortunately, most current governance models in Latin America and the Caribbean are characterized by bureaucratic structures that are fragmented into different sectors and whose actors do not have much interaction between them. With technical assistance from organizations, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, stakeholders in Latin America and the Caribbean are learning how to develop plans that encourage the collaboration of multiple sectors (e.g., transportation, housing) and improve the working relationships between various institutions (e.g. local associations, NGOs, private and public organizations). To be adequately prepared for a disaster, it is necessary to establish a network of actors that can engage quickly in decision-making and coordinate effectively between local, regional, and national levels.

Natural hazard governance has become complicated. This is because many recent disasters had the biggest impact in urban areas with a large concentration of people heavily dependent on infrastructure and services. The rapid urbanization, population increase, development of critical engineering works, industrialization of cities with modern types of buildings, and the concentration of population living in hazardous areas are matter of growing concern, as they are likely to contribute to heavier loss of life and increasing economic losses in future disaster damage. The El-Asnam (formerly Orléansville) earthquake of October 10, 1980 (Ms 7.4) raised the awareness of both the Algerian government and the civil society of the need for disaster risk reduction policy. Since then, disaster risk reduction has been on the agenda of the government programs, and concrete measures have been undertaken in organization, legislation, institutions, training, education, communication, and information. The government has made significant efforts to improve the natural hazard governance. It has made a substantial impact on academic research and higher education in some disciplines of engineering and natural science in the country’s largest universities. Risk governance for natural hazard in Algeria will be seen here in light of the implementation mechanisms, the main achievements and progress, the new legal and regulatory tools and mechanisms, and cooperation aspects. In conclusion there will be a discussion about global evaluation and perspectives.

A major implication of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 involved the radical transformation of the national security system. Its fundamentally militaristic paradigm focused on civil defense to prepare and protect communities against the strikes of conventional and nuclear warheads. It called for a more comprehensive and balanced civil protection policy oriented primarily to the communities’ and facilities’ preparedness and response to natural hazards impact and disasters. This change in policy was further catalyzed by the catastrophic results of the major disasters in the late 1980s, such as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion of 1986 and the Armenian earthquake of 1988. As a result, in 1989, a specialized body was organized, the State Emergency Commission at the USSR Council of Ministers. A year later in the Russian Federation (at that time a part of the Soviet Union), an analogous commission was established. In 1991, it was reorganized into the State Committee for Civil Defense, Emergency Management, and Natural Disasters Response at the request of the president of the Russian Federation (EMERCOM). In 1994, this was replaced by the much more powerful Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergency Management, and Natural Disasters Response (which kept the abbreviation EMERCOM). In the early 21st century, this ministry is the key government body responsible for (a) development and implementation of the policy for civil defense and the regions’ protection from natural and technological hazards and disasters, and (b) leading and coordinating activities of the federal executive bodies in disaster policy areas within the Russian Federation’s Integrated State System for Emergency Prevention and Response (EPARIS). In addition, as well as in the former Soviet Union, the scientific and research organizations’ efforts to collect relevant data, monitor events, and conduct field and in-house studies to reduce the risk of disasters is crucially important. The nature of EPARIS is mainly a function of the geographic characteristics of the Russian Federation. These include the world’s largest national territory, which is vastly extended both longitudinally and latitudinally, a relatively populous Arctic region, large mountain systems, and other characteristics that create high diversity in the natural environment and combinations of natural hazards. Meanwhile, along with the natural conditions of significant size and a multiethnic composition of the population, distinctive features of a historical development path and institutional factors also contribute to diversity of settlement patterns, a high degree of economic development, and a level and quality of human life both within and between the regions of Russia. For instance, even within one of the region’s urbanized areas with a high-quality urban environment and developed socioeconomic institutions, neighboring communities exist with a traditional lifestyle and economic relations, primitive technological tools, and so on (e.g., indigenous small ethnic groups of the Russian North, Siberia, and the Far East). The massive spatial disparity of Russia creates different conditions for exposure and vulnerability of the regions to natural hazards’ impacts on communities and facilities, which has to be considered while preparing, responding to, and recovering from disasters. For this reason, EMERCOM’s organizational structure includes a central (federal) headquarters as well as Central, Northwestern, Siberian, Southern, and Moscow regional territorial branches and control centers for emergency management in all of the 85 administrative entities (subjects) of the Russian Federation. Specific features of both the EMERCOM territorial units and ministries and EPARIS as a whole coping with disasters are considered using the 2013 catastrophic flood in the Amur River basin in the Far East of Russia as a case study.

The Caribbean is a multiethnic, multilingual archipelago of islands and mainland territories, with similar experiences of European colonialism and modern-day globalization. The countries generally enjoy stable political systems but grapple with many of the problems experienced by countries elsewhere. These include vulnerability to natural disasters, migration, violence, and drug abuse. Lifestyle diseases such as cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease are on the increase, and the region is second only to sub-Saharan Africa in the prevalence of HIV and AIDS. In the English-speaking Caribbean, social work is well established, and social service provisioning is modeled on the traditional welfare state approach. A few countries have achieved universal levels of social service delivery.

Building early warning systems (EWS) is a complex process, both technically and socially, and these differ significantly across continents, countries, and communities. However, they all have a similar vision and elements to build upon: risk knowledge, monitoring and warning, warning dissemination and communication, and response capability. Citizens must know, understand, and appreciate the risks. Program managers and public information professionals need help to accomplish that. They must unite with each other and the community to transition from a baseline to a level that promotes action. The monitoring and warning systems must function. Any misstep reduces trust. Lack of clarity results in a lack of action. The difference between system tests and real-world applications must be fully transparent. Warning dissemination and communication must occur before, during, and after any crisis event. All these areas are where operators and communicators need to link, and the response capability is integral to the content of the EWS. The environment, geography, social characteristics, and previous disaster experiences also shape the EWS content. This can only be achieved through a people-centered approach. The media is vital in this operational phase for helping to implement and execute early warnings. In addition, the media play a related and equally critical role in strategic communications to educate and inform societies to respond appropriately. There are countless tools available to public affairs professionals, none mutually exclusive. The rote application of a news release followed by a tweet or two has been proven to be ineffective. EWS systems and strategic communications should be tailored to the needs of the individual communities. Community demographics, geographies, and cultural sensitivities determine optimum communication tools. Leveraging mediums that audiences prefer affords greater reach within vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Their television, their radio, their print, and their social media are the bedrock for engagement. Mediums do not need to be high-tech. Messages can go into communities and schools, repeated by trusted messengers, through all means, including flyers, town halls, civic engagements, and other citizen-led initiatives. Social media has the capacity to be far-reaching, strategic, and audience-focused. Case studies and best practices reveal what went wrong, what went right, and what can go right. They reveal the difference between effective and ineffective media and EWS. The landscape is changing; lessons elucidate that. Analysis, study, and reflection are foundational to more effective EWS in the future. For information to be actionable, it must be accessible.