There were an unusually large number of disasters in 2020, including the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and, in the US, a record number of billion-dollar disasters. How people respond when faced with a crisis affects the ability of authorities to provide information and manage the situation. Understanding how to effectively communicate will be increasingly important as climate change fuels natural disasters in the future and political instability raises other risks. The last few decades have produced extensive research on how people respond to a crisis. Physiological and psychological responses in a disaster can hamper people’s ability to respond or help them survive. Many people freeze when faced with a disaster. Several factors can cause this, including disbelief, failure to quickly accept that things are not normal, the desire to avoid overreacting in front of peers, and limitations on the brain’s ability to process rapidly changing information. Denial has caused many people to freeze in the face of danger, but it also can help prevent people from panicking. Natural emotional responses can lead people to ignore critical information or help them to react. In some cases, experience can lead to miscalculation, such as when people refuse to evacuate before a hurricane because they have survived past hurricanes. In other cases, experience helps people survive a disaster, as they know what to do. During a crisis, people desperately seek information but struggle to process it. In a disaster, normal assumptions that help people make sense of their world can fail. For example, survivors of the 1964 Alaska earthquake reported that basic assumptions about physics suddenly did not apply, as the ground shook and rippled. Sudden and overwhelming change, combined with the effects of fear, make it difficult for people to process what is happening, sometimes leading to deadly delays. However, seeking information is a natural response, and people will often look to multiple sources. These natural responses have important implications for how authorities try to communicate critical information before, during and after a disaster. Many disaster management experts emphasize the importance of providing clear and consistent messages to people, which must be consistent across multiple sources, such as TV, social media and official statements. It is essential to provide pragmatic steps that people can take in an emergency; empowering people to respond is critical, particularly in the first few minutes or hours of a disaster. Information should come from a source that the affected communities trust and should be updated as the crisis unfolds. It is also important to prepare for potential disasters. As Amanda Ripley wrote in “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why,” disaster plans should consider how normal people caught up in a disaster should respond, rather than simply waiting for official first responders. When training people for a disaster, messages should be clear and should provide a basic explanation as to why someone should do something. For example, during a pre-flight safety presentation, when flight attendants instruct passengers to put on their own oxygen mask before helping others, it makes more sense if people understand that they would need the mask in order to remain conscious so they can assist their children or others. In large buildings, people should be trained to know how to find the exits and evacuate. Disaster plans also need to take into consideration the reality of people’s lives; for example, women might have to evacuate while wearing high heels and able-bodied people might have to help others who are injured or disabled. While there is extensive research on how to communicate in a short-term disaster — such as an earthquake, hurricane or terrorist attack — information on managing long-term crises is more complicated. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change pose additional challenges. In a sudden disaster, the need to respond is obvious and communities tend to be good at working together to recover. Longer-term crises are often less obvious; for example, many COVID-19 victims have died behind closed doors in hospitals. Also, it is difficult and even unhealthy for people to maintain a constant sense of urgency, fear or anger — emotions that are useful to responding in an immediate crisis — over months or years. New crises will always come along too. It is difficult and even unhealthy for people to maintain a constant sense of urgency, fear or anger over months or years. Kerry Boyd Anderson Another challenge is that the human brain struggles to comprehend enormous impacts. Studies have shown that people are more likely to emotionally react to one victim than to thousands; we often lose our sense of efficacy when faced with overwhelming suffering. When encountering huge, complex problems such as climate change, many people react either by denying that the problem is real or by deciding there is nothing to do about it. An additional problem is that people’s realities are often different. With the pandemic, some people have lost multiple loved ones, while others do not know anyone who has been seriously ill. With climate change, some communities feel the direct impacts and others do not. Effective communication in long-term crises is more complicated than short-term disasters, but there are some lessons to be learned. Constant fear-based messaging tends to be counterproductive in long-term crises. As Ezra Markowitz and Lucia Graves noted in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, messaging about long-term crises should include positive messages about the better world we could create and should provide “concrete solutions” that would help to address problems. As with short-term disasters, empowering people with clear, consistent messages and pragmatic action can help communities cope with long-term crises. Kerry Boyd Anderson is a writer and political risk consultant with more than 16 years of experience as a professional analyst of international security issues and Middle East political and business risk. Her previous positions include deputy director for advisory with Oxford Analytica and managing editor of Arms Control Today. Twitter: @KBAresearch Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view