Knowledge-Based Crisis and Emergency Management

This chapter provides lessons learnt from the JRC on emergency management. Two or three decades ago, crisis situations were problematic due to lack of information. Now, policymakers, practitioners and politicians are more in a situation of information overflow and challenges of making sense of contradictory information under conditions of complexity and socio-technical interdependencies. Science and knowledge enable a shift from reactive to proactive risk management. Five lessons learnt from the JRC focus on the (1) tight feedback loops between scientific developments and their application in the real world of practitioners, policymakers and politicians; (2) choosing the right information, provided to the right people, in the right time, at the right format; (3) visual approaches such as communication with maps; (4) importance of trust and trustworthiness in relations with practitioners and decision-makers; (5) plea for transdisciplinary learning through networking and partnerships.