Human society faces a multitude of hazards of diverse nature, characterized by different levels of complexity, uncertainty, for being timeless and extending its effects globally. These causes disruption and negative impacts in the social structure of communities, on human health and on the natural environment and urban heritage.
There is a growing awareness and need to respond to these situations. The state of the art refers that risk communication and governance mechanisms are a supporting tool to deal responsibly with risks, empowering citizens to better deal with risk in their lives. However, the scientific literature also reveals multiple concepts and approaches, being not consensual on the risk concept or its perception by different stakeholders, and as a consequence lacking on reaching preparedness or response capacity of communities facing a disaster.
Assuming that it is possible to draw learning lessons from the analysis of disaster case studies leading to better preparation of people in order to cope responsibly with the risks, we analyzed three case studies on natural and technological risks. The major events are hurricane Katrina (USA), L’aquila earthquake (Italy) and Japan’s triple disaster, where we looked for evidences regarding the meaning of these events to those who lived them, and analyze the way in which the risk was communicated, by whom, and in what stage of the catastrophe; additionally, what impact the risk communication and governance had on the behavior of the affected populations, which lessons can be used in future situations on how to proceed and behave facing disaster events, and what to avoid in order to minimize the risk of the affected populations.
The results of the comparative analysis of these three major events reveal a general inability to unforeseen and deal with major events. In all of the case studies there were conflicts of interest, ineffective governance, phenomena of corruption, concealment of information, inadequate risk communication, serious failures, false security transmission and a general inability to conceive worst-case scenario, leading to a general loss of confidence and especially in the case of L’Aquila and Japan, global consequences, in science and nuclear energy respectively.
The main conclusions reveals that the implementation of mechanisms of risk communication and governance constitute support instruments to help deal responsibly with risks, being a serious support on the effective construction of collective knowledge, essential to ensure the maturity of citizens and the responsiveness of entities facing the occurrence of risk.