Our societies and the risks they face are increasingly becoming more complex and interdependent. As a result, scholarship in disaster communication must propose systemic solutions to problems that extend beyond boundaries that have traditionally characterized the field. The emergence of risks (e.g., systemic risk) that transgress national borders (cross-border risks) and endanger the functioning of key societal systems demands for innovative and cross-system thinking to address the communication challenges inherent to them. To make this happen, it is fundamental to create, nurture, and bolster collaborations and partnerships among different actors through cross-actor and cross-organization communication, and to come up with theoretical knowledge and evidence-based practices that work across spaces (e.g., in different settings), hazards (e.g., multi-hazard and multi-risk communication), and times (multi-phase risk and disaster communication).

Scholarship about disaster communication has often been constrained within a case-study approach, whereby lessons are drawn from experiences collected in local settings, single-hazard scenarios, and in a specific disaster phase (e.g., pre-, during, or after a disaster). However, the rapid emergence of new forms of systemic and pervasive risks makes it urgent to move away from such an approach and embrace one that looks at common patterns and differences between nations, cultures, disciplines, disaster phases, and societal systems and sectors. This is not an easy task, and it requires both the scientific community studying disaster communication and the practitioners working daily in disaster communication activities to join up their efforts.

This Research Topic seeks to pull together articles spanning different disciplinary fields that advance knowledge on disaster communication through innovative analyses and solutions. To this end, collaboration among experts from different disciplines and with diverse expertise is encouraged. Authors are especially prompted to adopt a complexity-based and systems thinking approach in their submissions.

The Research Topic welcomes contributions that tackle one or more of the following topics:

• cross-border disaster communication
• communication across the disaster cycle (cross-phase communication)
• cross-organization disaster communication
• cross-sector disaster communication (e.g., the One Health approach)
• cross-system disaster communication (e.g., communication that work across different societal systems, such as health systems, food systems, trade systems etc.)
• disaster communication to address systemic risks
• cross-actor communication (including communication ecologies)
• cross-setting disaster communication (e.g., the comparative analysis of case studies with the aim of developing overarching knowledge)
• cross-cultural disaster communication
• cross-disciplinary disaster communication.

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Frontiers in Communication

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