Scientific Communication in Disaster Risk Management: Bridging Scientific Knowledge and Public Decision-Making

Abstract

Contemporary disaster risk management rests on an assumption that is rarely interrogated: that scientific knowledge about hazards, once produced, will travel intact from laboratories and monitoring networks to policymakers, journalists, and ultimately to publics who will act upon it. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 formalises this expectation by placing the understanding of risk, and the availability of risk information and early warning to people, at the centre of its priorities and targets. Yet recent catastrophes demonstrate that the translation of scientific knowledge into collective decision-making is a contested, institutionally mediated, and frequently failing process. This paper examines that process as a chain of four interdependent actors—scientists who produce hazard and risk data, institutions that formulate policy and issue authoritative messages, journalists and platforms that mediate information, and publics who interpret it and decide how to respond—and asks where, why, and under what institutional conditions the chain breaks.

Drawing on Beck’s (1992) theory of the risk society, the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (Kasperson et al., 1988), and the science–policy interface literature, the study conducts a structured qualitative comparison of two emerging-economy cases against international benchmarks. The first case concerns Turkey and the communication dynamics surrounding the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence, including the relationship between the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) and independent seismological voices. The second concerns Kazakhstan, where the 2024 spring floods and recurrent industrial hazards are analysed through the roles of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, hydrometeorological and scientific actors, and the strategic analysis of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies (KazISS). Japan’s Meteorological Agency, the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and European arrangements serve as comparative benchmarks. The evidentiary basis comprises document analysis of institutional reports and frameworks (KazISS, AFAD, UNDRR, FEMA) and a media framing analysis.

The paper advances three propositions. First, communication effectiveness depends less on rhetorical skill exercised during a crisis than on institutional architecture established beforehand: standing protocols, pre-negotiated language for uncertainty, and clearly designated, plural channels of authoritative voice. Second, centralised control over hazard communication purchases short-term coherence at the price of long-term credibility, particularly where independent experts and official bodies diverge in public. Third, digital platforms do not create communication gaps so much as accelerate and monetise them, converting information vacuums into amplified misinformation wherever institutional trust is low.

The analysis yields four contributions: a synthesis of theoretical models of crisis communication; a comparative matrix of institutional risk communication in Turkey and Kazakhstan; a typology of scientific miscommunication across the two cases; and a proposed protocol for integrating scientific data into public policy in emerging economies, together with recommendations for DISSTE–UPO standards. The paper concludes that bridging the divide between scientific knowledge and public decision-making is best understood not as a problem of simplifying messages for deficient audiences, but as a problem of designing trustworthy institutions.