Co-creation as an approach to bridge the Risk Perception Action Gap and customise crowdsourcing tools to respond effectively to climatic risks

Natural hazards are considered main challenges for the degradation of the built environment and communities across the globe. The frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events is also expected to substantially increase on the European continent, threatening societies and hampering effort for building resilience to disasters (Michalis and Vintzileou, 2022). Technological solutions can play a significant role in all phases of disaster risk management, mostly enhancing prevention, preparedness and response to disasters; however, the provision of accurate, timely and advanced information in case of natural hazards to both citizens and protection authorities remains a challenging issue. Moreover, technological solutions have not yet been sufficiently tested during all the phases of disaster risk management (Ouzounoglou et al., 2022).
This work presents the co-creation activities of RiskPACC project, which focuses on enhancing the preparedness actions undertaken by citizens focusing on bridging the Risk Perception Action Gap (RPAG). The RPAG refers to the lack of active engagement of citizens to the preparedness and response phases of crisis situations of evolving risks which are usually focused on one-way and top-down risk communication that is most of the times initiated by Civil Protection Authorities (CPAs).
The co-creation approach aims to facilitate interaction between citizens and CPAs by evolving their collaboration into a two-way communication flow and at the same time drive technical developments to enhance understanding the risk perception in an effort to bridge the RPAG between CPAs and citizens. The scope of this work is to provide an overview of the 1st round of co-creation activities carried out in RiskPACC project, and to outline the methodological approach that was put into practice in order to facilitate the activities of Rapid Prototyping. More specifically, an overview of workshops which were carried out with the main objective to bring together technology providers and end users is presented. This aimed at matching the case studies with specific crowdsourcing tools through a series of iterative sessions, which incorporated the use of storyboard user stories to provide an understanding of potential functionalities of each tool. The main outcomes of internal co-creation workshops were employed to optimise the proposed functionalities of the tools based on the requirements and particularities of each case study. This was followed by a series of external workshops which further presented the updated functionalities of tools and also delivered feedback for further development of the conceptual aspects of the technological tools.