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Modern industry faces many communication challenges, including social media. The second edition of this book is thoroughly updated, expanded, and reorganized to help industry communicators remain effective in addressing these challenges. At the core of this book are foundational building blocks that address the human factors responsible for driving success or failure when communicating about environmental risk.Features Provides principled guidance for building relationships and engaging in constructive dialogue with stakeholders. Offers straight talk and practical, easy-to-follow guidance on effective risk communication for various situations, stakeholders, and modes of communication. Gives lessons learned from environmental permitting and crisis situations involving risk communication in various industries, including chemical manufacturing, waste management, and the energy sector. Addresses nuanced, recent concerns regarding issues like fake news and social media bullying. Examines the dos and don'ts of communicating effectively during tough conditions like environmental emergencies. Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry is intended to be both a grounding in enduring principles and a continued resource for best approaches and techniques. Coupled with tools and best practices from decades of experience, this insider's guide provides CEOs, plant managers, environmental compliance professionals, health and safety officers, and others with the direction and the confidence needed to prepare for difficult dialogue and high-pressure encounters.

A public meeting with angry residents and eager reporters is a common feature on the local news. Whether addressing environmental, or other issues, the experience for the board members, consultants, and specialists at these meetings ranges from uncomfortable to nightmarish. The issues discussed in these meetings usually stem from years of community disappointment, mistrust, fears, factions, political or social positioning, or all of the above. Industry faces a labyrinth of environmental and business regulations, and unique challenges in dealing with the public and the media. Environmental Risk Communication serves as a guide to understanding and complying with the Federal Risk Management Program and applying risk management and communication principles to daily plant operations. This book also helps Risk Management Plan (RMP) facilities successfully meet the new Federal requirements for public disclosure of RMP offsite consequence analysis results and provides techniques for communicating effectively during environmental emergencies.Written in a straight-forward, no-nonsense style the book presents concise informative chapters, flow diagrams, checklists, and a thorough index. The authors present step-by-step instruction on developing a principled plan of action that generates open communications. CEOs, Corporate Communications Specialists, Plant Managers, Environmental Compliance Supervisors, Health and Safety Officers, Environmental Scientists and Engineers, and Consultants will benefit from Environmental Risk Communication.

Exploring Risk Communication presents a systematic planning approach to risk communication. Risk communication is seen by many as an important tool for managing technological, environmental, and natural risks. The book's goal is to improve risk communication processes in these areas between private and public risk communication sources and the public. The systematic planning approach focuses on research activities which are considered to be diagnostic tools providing insight into the public's reactions to risks and into the public's cognitive abilities to process risk information. These studies give us the necessary ingredients for an adequate risk communication from the audience side of the risk communication process. Evaluation studies are considered necessary to monitor the effectiveness of the communication. Exploring Risk Communication provides a review of current research in risk communication, focusing on perceived trust and credibility of risk communication sources, and arguments in risk messages, risk comparison, and framing of risk. Special attention is paid to the mass media context of risks and its impact on public perception. Finally, the potential of the new interactive media for risk communication is reviewed. The authors have performed several communication studies in the risk area, working from their social psychological background. This results in a monograph interesting to those working on risk communication issues on an academic level, but the systematic planning approach is also a useful frame of reference for risk communication practitioners, or for those who are just interested in the often complex risk communication issues.

Risk communication: the evolution of attempts Risk communication is at once a very new and a very old field of interest. Risk analysis, as Krimsky and Plough (1988:2) point out, dates back at least to the Babylonians in 3200 BC. Cultures have traditionally utilized a host of mecha­ nisms for anticipating, responding to, and communicating about hazards - as in food avoidance, taboos, stigma of persons and places, myths, migration, etc. Throughout history, trade between places has necessitated labelling of containers to indicate their contents. Seals at sites of the ninth century BC Harappan civilization of South Asia record the owner and/or contents of the containers (Hadden, 1986:3). The Pure Food and Drug Act, the first labelling law with national scope in the United States, was passed in 1906. Common law covering the workplace in a number of countries has traditionally required that employers notify workers about significant dangers that they encounter on the job, an obligation formally extended to chronic hazards in the OSHA's Hazard Communication regulation of 1983 in the United States. In this sense, risk communication is probably the oldest way of risk manage­ ment. However, it is only until recently that risk communication has attracted the attention of regulators as an explicit alternative to the by now more common and formal approaches of standard setting, insuring etc. (Baram, 1982).

With contributions from leading international experts, this book provides a comprehensive review of warnings and risk communications. The authors explain how best to communicate warnings, whether certain communications are effective, and what factors influence the communication process and address the major issues in theory, research, and applications of warnings and risk communication. The book is an authoritative sourcebook on the theory, research, and applications in the field. It provides a resource for professionals and academics in diverse domains that range from human factors/ergonomics, engineering psychology, marketing, and design, to industry, government, and litigation.