Presentation Description
Communities often understand their own hazard exposure differently than official measurements describe it, and the measurements themselves capture less than we tend to assume. This session opens with what standard heat metrics do and do not represent, then turns to recent research on heat risk perception in South Carolina, where measured exposure and residents' assessments of their own risk did not align in the ways preparedness planning expects. Participants will consider what drives that divergence, why additional data and additional alerts do not reliably resolve it, and how information reaches populations that formal channels miss. The second half of the session focuses on trusted intermediaries, including allied health leaders, community organizations, and libraries, and on what it means to work through existing relationships rather than build new ones during an emergency. Extreme heat serves as the case throughout, and the assessment approach applies to whichever hazards matter most in a given service area. Participants will leave with a method for assessing risk perception locally and for determining which intermediaries are positioned to reach the populations they are missing.
Speaker Bio
Brett Robertson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the College of Information and Communications (CIC) and Associate Director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute (HVRI) at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on disaster preparedness, risk communication, and improving access to critical information during emergencies. His current work includes community-engaged fieldwork on extreme heat in rural South Carolina, a multi-state study of how residents perceive changing local conditions, and an Institute of Museum and Library Services project connecting hazard communication to public library systems. He has published extensively on disaster resilience, emergency communication, and collaborative efforts to strengthen public safety, and his work has earned the W. Charles Redding Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association and the Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award, the highest honor for undergraduate teaching at the University of South Carolina.
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By the end of the webinar, participants will be able to:
- Explain what standard heat metrics do and do not capture, and how community risk perception can diverge from measured exposure.
- Describe the characteristics of trusted intermediaries in rural and socially vulnerable communities and how those relationships form.
- Apply a structured approach to assessing hazard risk perception within a local service area.
- Analyze which organizations and individuals in their own service area are positioned to reach populations that formal information channels miss.