The March 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (GEJE), resulting tsunami, and Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant safety systems failures were catastrophic for Japan, and have influenced risk perceptions and policies globally. The nature of that influence remains an active area of social scientific inquiry. Early findings suggest that risk communication and management inadequacies contributed to the social amplification of events. The symposium will provide a timely opportunity to synthesize emerging social and behavioral risk research findings regarding these extreme events, develop a risk communication and management research agenda to address the challenges identified, and inform ongoing international risk communication and disaster risk reduction efforts.
Research to date on the nature and consequences of Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (GEJE) and Fukushima-related risk communications identifies a wide range of contributory factors, ranging from lack of scientific consensus and public misconceptions about the risks, to social amplification of risk by the media, lack of transparency by management, and insufficient public engagement. Nevertheless, an overarching synthesis and assessment of theoretical implications and resulting risk communication research questions stemming from these events is lacking, and would advance the related risk and decision sciences. Extreme events of the last decade have increased in impact, heightening the global focus on the necessity of disaster risk reduction. International efforts to improve the evidence base for risk management include the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) supported by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), the International Council for Science (ICSU), and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and UNISDR activities, including its lead role in developing a post-2015 Hyogo Framework for Action. Risk Interpretation and Action (RIA) is a key activity of the IRDR, with the aim of understanding how people, both decision-makers and ordinary citizens, make decisions, individually and collectively, in the face of risk, and thereby contributing to an integrated research approach to disaster risk reduction, to ultimately decrease disaster risks worldwide. The proposed symposium advances this agenda, as well as integration of this research with research on the communication and management of extreme technological risks, and enhances collaboration between Japan and the U.S. in the social, decision and risk sciences.
