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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.

Sec. Disaster Communications

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1542966

This article is part of the Research Topic Cross-Boundary Disaster Communication: Building Systems Thinking and Breaking Traditional Divisions in the Field View all 4 articles

Can data cross frontiers? Challenges and drivers for cross-border data sharing for disaster risk reduction (DRR)

Provisionally accepted
Anouck Adrot Anouck Adrot *Henri Isaac Henri Isaac Salome Ritouret Salome Ritouret
  • UMR7088 Dauphine Recherches en Management (DRM), Paris, Île-de-France, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Data sharing is a key driver of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and supports the resilience of cross-border regions. However, data sharing across borders remains challenging, and only a limited number of regions have significantly progressed in this area. A better understanding of the challenges of data sharing in cross-border DRR ecosystems is therefore needed but remains overlooked in the literature. This research, which is based on a qualitative and collaborative design, focuses on the Italy–France border, which has been pursuing efforts to create a cross-border data ecosystem for DRR in recent years. This study consists of a comprehensive analysis, which is primarily based on qualitative interviews, observations, and archive analyses. It outlines how the cross-border setting exacerbates the challenges of data sharing for DRR. Cross-border DRR actors struggle to build trust around the data and adopt a unified data strategy across borders. However, in the face of these challenges, DRR actors are gradually transforming their DRR practices by incorporating cooperative, trustful, and inclusive relationships. Our findings contribute to a more situated understanding of data sharing at borders and call for greater consideration of border settings and the agency from practitioners involved in data sharing for international DRR.

    Keywords: Disaster risk reduction (DRR), data sharing, Cross-border cooperation, emergence, Disaster Management

    Received: 10 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Adrot, Isaac and Ritouret. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Anouck Adrot, UMR7088 Dauphine Recherches en Management (DRM), Paris, 75775, Île-de-France, France

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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