Wildfire communication from municipalities to communities in Portugal: An exploratory analysis

Abstract

Enhancing preparedness that enables people and communities to effectively anticipate, respond to, and recover from the impacts of a wildfire requires interactive communication. The purpose of this research is to understand how municipalities are communicating with communities regarding wildfires. Municipalities represent the lowest level of governance in Portugal and their responsibility for wildfire risk communication is fixed by law. In addition, this paper evaluates the influence of experience with extreme wildfires on communication processes. An online questionnaire was sent to 275 Portugal mainland municipalities (the official number of municipalities is 278, but three municipalities were not considered because they are entirely urban areas without wildland). One hundred and one municipalities participated in the survey (37% response rate). The survey identified the predominant use of one-way communication, lack of continuity of communication activities, and lack of purpose and content of the awareness-raising activities. The main difficulty municipalities encountered was the lack of interest from several target groups, which was mainly due to them continuing to use ineffective communication and not engaging citizens in the process. Considering the contact between municipalities and their citizens, a more interactive role in the wildfire communication process by using two-way communication exchanges is advocated to enhance preparedness and avoid casualties and losses.