Foreword

National Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies have a long history on working with communities and people at disaster risk on the threats they face, how this makes them vulnerable and what steps they can take themselves to increase their safety and resilience. National Societies undertake this task through various activities: national public campaigns, partnerships with education authorities for developing educational materials for schools, mobilising youth and junior Red Cross Red Crescent for peer education, training and organizing communities through community-based disaster risk reduction, and using their disaster response operations as opportunities for improved risk awareness.

In 2011, the IFRC published Public awareness and education for disaster risk reduction – a guide, designed to help National Societies scale up their work in disaster risk reduction campaigning, partnerships and education. Alongside this guide, we carried out research on what activities are going on within National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies, and within the wider sector, to harmonize messages for disaster risk reduction.

Harmonized messaging is a key goal in disaster reduction awareness, and is particularly important when it comes to scaling-up efforts to create a culture of safety. To promote consistent actions to the public, we need key safety and resilience messages. Ensuring that these messages have credibility, legitimacy and strong impact, they need to be harmonized and consistent, backed by a consensus of key stakeholders, and based on the best knowledge available at the time.

This latest publication, Public awareness and education for disaster risk reduction: key messages, is offered as a tool for practitioners internationally to use in a consensus-building validation process. National Societies, national disaster management organizations, governmental and non-governmental organisations and international organizations are invited to be part of a global validation project working to develop a comprehensive multi-regional set of key messages as a contribution for the culmination of the 2005–2015 Hyogo Framework for Action.

With both publications now complete, the next step is to disseminate the materials, support National Societies to incorporate the ideas into their ongoing disaster risk reduction programmes, and scale up work nationally and regionally.

Bekele Geleta Secretary General

Part 1: Background

1. Introduction

In 2011, to help National Societies scale up their work in promoting disaster risk reduction (DRR) to the public, the Insert 'International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) published Public Awareness and Public Education for Disaster Risk Reduction: a guide. The guide provides operational guidance in support of IFRC’s Strategy 2020 and Framework for Community Safety and Disaster in the Face of Disaster Risk. This focus is reflected in the core pillars of the Framework, including common approaches, minimal tools and guidelines and standardized messages. The guide highlights key messages as playing an important role within all four of the key approaches outlined in Chapter 3 of the guide (campaigns, participatory learning, informal education and formal school-based interventions). Key messages are also vital in fulfilling the principles of consistency, legitimacy and credibility, scalability and sustainability, detailed in Chapter 4. Key messages that are clearly formulated, detailed and evidence based are essential ingredients that form the foundation for a culture of safety. They convey shared understanding through strong, unified messages achieved through a broad consensual process.

This supplement of the key messages for DRR is designed to be a tool for practitioners internationally to use in a consensus-building validation process. The IFRC invites National Societies, National Disaster Management Organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) to be part of a global validation project with the objective of developing a comprehensive multi-regional set of key messages for the World Congress of Disaster Reduction, marking the culmination of the 2005–2015 Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA).

Part 1 introduces the supplement, including the background and processes involved in developing the messages, as well as the purpose, scope and framework. It explains the validation process and sets out a series of participatory and consensus-based processes for that can be used to select, adapt, enrich and expand the set of key messages.

Part 2 provides the key messages themselves. Section A sets out the key messages for all-hazards household and family disaster prevention and then Section B presents hazard-specific advice for drought, earthquakes, floods, pandemics, tropical storms and wildfires.

Next steps: The key messages validation project will run for 18 months, from February 2013 to July 2014, with the goal of developing a fuller set of messages, with a variety of contextualized versions, in several languages, marking a significant contribution towards HFA priorities.