Planning: CRISES: Science Communication for Resilient Environments and Societies (SCORES)

Hazards such as wildfires and landslides threaten environmental and societal resilience and increase systemic inequities. Although experts provide increasingly accurate and speedy communication to guide public actions in response to hazard events, public actions frequently do not align with the best available science and guidance. Expert intuitions about how to communicate also do not always match evidence-based practices and, indeed, can harm comprehension and use of information.

Thus, the need exists to understand how people judge threats and make decisions about them so that more effective science communication methods are developed. This planning project investigates what is currently known and not known in these areas and identifies research gaps and opportunities that advance community needs. Developing long-term capacity to deliver effective risk messages will empower people to act safely in response to threats, build a more resilient society, and enhance quality of life.

Ultimately, it will improve societal wellbeing by increasing the public’s autonomy, avoiding harms of not preparing for crises or reacting inappropriately to them as they occur, improving quality of life, and saving money and lives.

This planning project develops plans for a transdisciplinary, convergent, and collaborative approach to advance knowledge on science communication related to environmental hazards. The project collaborates with historically marginalized and vulnerable communities to identify key opportunities and challenges drawing from research in decision science, risk analysis, psychology, and science communication.

The project uses a mixed methods and solutions-oriented approach that considers people’s mental models of hazards—their psychological representations of how hazards work and have impact—to develop evidence-based messages and educate communities about hazards while motivating protective behaviors. It integrates theory on mental models with that on emotion and statistics, thus contributing to mental-model, risk-communication, and other theories.

Planning and convening activities enable an integrative assessment from a social behavioral framework and co-produce a compelling and responsive strategic plan that captures the current landscape of research, identifies research gaps and opportunities—especially with respect to decision, risk, and psychological sciences related to hazards—aligns with and advances community needs, and leverages and develops natural and social sciences. The emergent theory-based taxonomy of effective risk communication is expected to improve hazard decision making.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.