Improving Disaster & Safety Information Delivery for Disaster-Vulnerable Populations

Improving Disaster & Safety Information Delivery for Disaster-Vulnerable Populations

Disaster and safety information is important for citizens in disaster situations as this assists the situational assessment and critical decision-making. Therefore, the central government in South Korea built and operates an emergency and disaster alert system called the Cell Broadcasting System (CBS) and local governments also established various disaster safety information delivery systems. However, these systems are primarily designed for the general citizens without any difficulties in reading and understanding these alerts or disaster and safety information. The elderly and disabled individuals are often referred to as ‘disaster-vulnerable populations’ or ‘disaster-vulnerable people’ and may encounter difficulties in receiving and understanding such disaster safety information promptly and effectively. This study focuses on the information delivery channels operated by the city of Seoul Metropolitan Government, aiming to identify the shortcomings of the current disaster information delivery channels. Furthermore, we examined relevant international cases and policies to extract the implications. This study proposes improvement measures to effectively deliver disaster information to disaster-vulnerable populations.