Literature review and guidance for communicating health-risks during Chemical, B

Literature review and guidance for communicating health-risks during Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) recovery

The National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) risk register describes the most significant types of risk the UK could face. Defra is responsible for recovery from a range of risks within the NSRA related to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) incidents. This usually includes policy and operational responsibility for environmental remediation and decontamination following major CBRN incidents.

Throughout recovery, Defra may need to provide technical risk information for other government departments to inform their decision-making and communication of health-risks with the public. Effective communication is critical because the framing used in risk communications will influence the public's interpretation of risk. This, in turn, will impact critical recovery behaviours such as willingness to return to impacted areas and compliance with safety protocols.

Due to the rarity of large-scale CBRN incidents, direct evidence into effective communication for CBRN contexts is scarce. Currently, the evidence informing CBRN recovery communications predominantly relies on guidance for other crisis contexts. One key limitation of this guidance for CBRN recovery contexts, is that it focuses on predominantly preparedness on response. For example, a key resource for informing crisis communications currently is "Crisis communication: A behavioural approach", which provides an overview of theory and practical considerations for communicating during crisis contexts. Whilst this guidance does include some considerations for communicating risk, these considerations mainly focus on encouraging protective behaviours by increasing risk-perception. This is useful for crisis preparedness and response, but is less suited to recovery, where communications must also de-escalate risk to promote safe return, normalisation, and trust in decontamination operations.

Additionally, current guidance does not account for the unique nature of risks associated with CBRN incidents. The risks posed by CBRN agents differ to many of the risks in other crises as they usually have less immediate impacts (as is the case for RN incidents), and/or are less well-understood by the public due to their complex and uncommon nature. This impacts risk-perception and the challenges facing effective communications. Due to the scarcity of evidence exploring CBRN communications in specific, it is still necessary to draw from evidence from other hazard and health-risk communication contexts as guidance does currently. However, the current guidance is lacking in that it does explore the applicability of this evidence to CBRN recovery contexts, nor provide sufficient detail into the communication of complex risks more broadly. This means it is still unclear which lessons to draw from other crisis/hazard communications guidance.