Community resilience

The overall objective of the cluster is to build resilience of the local populations to disasters and emergencies. This includes education, awareness, and early warning measures. Most important, vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities or the elderly, need to be identified to better understand the risk local communities face. More broadly, risk perception is key to mitigate disaster impacts. This cluster aims at addressing the following key research questions:  

• how do we ensure that risk perceptions are considered for improved community resilience?

• how can local communities, such as volunteers, be better integrated into disaster management and how can technology aid their preparedness?
• how do we identify and better protect vulnerable groups?
• how does crisis communication ultimately make communities more resilient to disasters?
• how can we support the mitigation of the so-called infodemic by advancing tools and processes that detect, track, debunk, and prevent misinformation?

To answer these questions, we aim at an interdisciplinary approach in terms of methods, tools, and team structure, ultimately working towards integrated emergency management.