Institutional risk and crisis communication on natural hazards and disaster risks in Yangon, Myanmar

The city of Yangon, Myanmar, is located in a disaster-prone area of Southeast Asia. To reduce the risk of natural hazards, relevant frameworks of the UN, ASEAN and Myanmar’s national and local levels focus on making citizens more resilient by improving their ability to anticipate, prevent, absorb and transform risks of disasters. Those documents’ core elements are knowledge provision, actionable advice on natural hazards and capacity building of citizens. Achieving the related goals requires holistic institutional risk and crisis communication (RCC) strategies, which implies clear procedures of internal and external communication and appropriate risk information monitoring. To improve the institutional RCC, current procedures need to be understood. This study mapped Yangon’s institutional RCC until the end of January 2021 and detected good practices and gaps therein. With a mixed-method approach, the institutional RCC was assessed in 2019/2020. The results disclosed a substantial framework of bidirectional institutional RCC in Yangon. Thus, to ensure the rapid dissemination of important information, communication redundancies must be installed. The results furthermore showed that a strong collaboration between institutional disaster risk management and specialized civil society organizations enhances civil disaster preparedness. To make people more resilient to disasters, mass and social media platforms offer opportunities that should be included into holistic RCC programs. • Yangon’s institutional RCC is bidirectional. • Collaboration between institutions and civic initiatives enhances disaster preparedness. • TV has a key role in communicating risks and transporting knowledge on hazards. • Opportunities of social media platforms are not yet exhaustively used.