Future-oriented activities as a concept for improved disaster risk management. Disaster Advances

his study promotes the idea of future-oriented thinking in disaster risk management and describes how forward-looking activities can play a role in reduction of future risks and impacts. It explicitly highlights how a common future-oriented proactive attitude built-up in participative stakeholder communication networks can assist in shaping and creating a vision of a less uncertain and ambiguous future. First, the advancement of the disaster management concept and its various stages, including risk analysis, mitigation and response are explained. Forward-looking activities on short- and long-term temporal scales are introduced and put into a disaster risk management context. Recent developments in risk and crisis communication are discussed as evolving in a new environment that emphasizes network-centric communication shaped by the increasing influence of web 2.0 social media platforms. It is further described how future-oriented processes and inherent communication approaches can improve disaster risk management. Finally, the various time-scale-dependent future-oriented activities are conceptually integrated into a framework of risk governance. Active and participative communication is thereby seen as the key for successfully implementing risk governance and favor disaster mitigation and future risk reduction.