Communication with Hazard Maps in Central America: A multidisciplinary science-media-community network (HazMap_CA)

Countries along the Pacific coast of Central America are exposed to high environmental risk from earthquakes, volcanic activity, tsunamis, meteorological hazards and landslides. Over the past two decades, disasters in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua alone have caused over US$9 billion in damage and affected more than 13.5 million people. Their exposure to these environmental hazards and their vulnerability to being adversely affected by them are exacerbated as a result of both the complex socio-political setting and approaches used in those countries for economic development.

Information about hazards and disasters is very commonly disseminated through maps. Hazard maps that are useful, usable and used have the potential to prevent disasters and build societal resilience. Although maps represent the important outward face of hazard research, they are cartographic representations of inherently complex information, with large associated uncertainties. Further, the effective understanding, perception, experience and usage of maps calls for multidisciplinary engagement. This proposal will bring together and form, for the first time, a network of researchers and practitioners to understand how hazard maps can be used more effectively to communicate hazard information with decision makers, emergency managers, NGOs, and the public before, during and after times of crisis.

The challenges that need to be addressed in doing this demand input from diverse groups, including academic researchers and practitioners and stakeholder groups. Further, while knowledge informed by Western scientific approaches has an extremely important role to play in hazard and disaster management, its utility remains limited if it is not brought into a meaningful dialogue with alternative approaches and understandings. Our intention is therefore to create a network that brings together expertise from natural sciences, cartography, visual geographies, landscape perception, media and communication studies and Central American development studies to facilitate engagement between disciplines that would not normally interact. In combination these can produce a more detailed and multifaceted understanding of how maps are used to convey hazards associated with the landscape. The network will involve bringing together existing, yet separate, working groups who are actively engaged in initiatives to address development and disaster preparedness in Central America. This will be facilitated through two workshops, one in the UK and one in Central America.

Our central aim is to address developmental issues in the region by strengthening existing emergency management systems and creating useful modes of hazard communication that empower communities, enhance the effectiveness of communication and increase resilience.

This project proposes foundation-building activities, and as such direct impact through these activities will be largely focused on activities and engagements that take place at the main workshop in Guatemala in Spring 2017. We identified four principal socio-economic beneficiary groups that could benefit from this work:

1. Hazard practitioners: Individuals at government agencies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua that are responsible for undertaking volcano monitoring and hazard assessments.

2. Decision makers/Civil Protection: that utilize hazard assessments and information on the state of unrest of a particular volcano to make hazard management decisions for short term hazard mitigation as well as long term planning.

3. Academics in our partner countries from any of the main disciplinary areas covered by this network.

4. NGOs and Charities: Any non-profit, voluntary citizens group which is organized on a local, national or international level in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua that take responsibility for administering aid and/or improving wellbeing.

5. General public: People living in hazardous areas are often aware of hazards in the landscape, and may have prior experience of them will be benefited by being able to make decisions about their own livelihood.

In particular we wish to highlight our partnership with the Charity MapAction. MapAction is a humanitarian mapping charity based in the UK that works through specialist volunteers. Its aim is to save lives and minimize suffering by making the response to humanitarian emergencies as efficient and effective as possible. When a disaster strikes, MapAction deploys volunteer mapping professionals to the scene to help inform and coordinate response activities and get aid to where it is needed most. In their letter of support MapAction outline 5 separate ways in which the proposal is directly relevant and will impact the work that they undertake.

These groups will all be represented at the Guatemala workshop. Therefore the methods and activities for engagement will be directly through the workshop activities.

Broader Impacts and impacts extending beyond the workshop

Policy makers: Through facilitating major improvements to the development of effective hazard maps, this project offers pathways to reducing risk. As well as addressing NERCs increasing resilience to natural hazard impact area, this research follows the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction guidelines for natural hazards and risk management by addressing hazard phenomena with the highest impact on lives, and potentially livelihoods, and property assets. We will engage directly with UNISDR Science and Technical Advisory group. The proposed project will address all three of the UNISDR Science and Technical Advisory Group recommendations to help strengthen Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policies and practices: (i) share knowledge for action; (ii) use a multidisciplinary approach to research; and (iii) build systems resilience through local, national, regional and international partnerships.