Knowledge transfer for sustainable risk communication practice: Advancing student and professionals skills in risk communication

Executive Summary

New Zealand (and international) natural hazard professionals often receive limited or no formal training in communication and may not have time to be up to date with current communication research. Additionally, science communication training is often 1-dimensional and recipe-style which doesn’t allow us to explore the contextual and situational nature of communication. Since 2010, the Geoscience Education Research Group has developed authentic risk communication curricula and training exercises (e.g., Communicate the Quake or the Volcanic Hazards Simulation1). Our experience developing such curricula provided us with teaching and communication best practice which we felt could be valuable for professionals. The development of the Communicate the Quake role-play and the associated research into its effectiveness at developing communication skills was funded by Ako Aotearoa, the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence and a final report of this work was completed in September 2016.