Insights about what authorities and emergency services need and expect from society

ABSTRACT

When crises occur, the society plays significant roles, such as assisting victims, helping vulnerable groups, sharing information, allocating resources etc. However, for the response to crises to succeed, society, authorities and emergency services should align their efforts and needs in a coordinated way. To identify this alignment, we designed an internet-based survey asking authorities, emergency services, and volunteer organizations about the needs and expectations they have from the society to better handle crises. The questionnaire is divided into two main sections the first section covers the responders’ risk awareness, and the second gathers the needs they have from society in the following items social norms and sense of communality, coping skills, resources to face a crisis, perception of trust, perception of responsibility, crisis knowledge, crisis communication, communication channels, information sharing and preparedness. The survey was launched in 7 European countries and this paper presents the results collected in Spain. The answers show that in general there is a high consensus in the analysed items, though the distribution shows that authorities differ the most from the other responder profile groups. The results show that the responders are more aware of pandemics followed by extreme weather related events. We think this is because of the huge impact that is creating the current coronavirus pandemic. © ESREL 2021. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.