Put simply, the goals of any risk communication program are to deliver the right information in the right format via the right media to the right people at the right time. Communication is the transmission or exchange of information, knowledge, or ideas between a source and an audience by means of a medium. Risk communication, specifically, is the "interactive process of exchange of information and opinions among individuals, groups, and institutions concerning a risk or potential risk to human health or the environment" (Committee on Risk Perception and Communication, National Research Council 1989).
Risk communication should be a primary topic of concern for resilient communities researchers and emergency management program managers. Although scholarship on risk communication exists in a number of fields from engineering to decision-management to sociology; the research presented here emerges from rhetorical scholarship in technical and organizational settings. This briefing presents an overview of risk communication as it relates to resilient communities, identifies important scholarship in the field of risk communication, and makes some recommendations for future research. The goal here is to better inform the application of risk communication strategies within resilient communities, particularly those strategies that foster and elaborate close partnerships between communities and emergency management. The argument that propels this initiative is straightforward: all communities are "discourse communities" in that they share cultural and linguistic commonplaces - in other words, discourse "holds" the community together. In this way, we might consider community resilience as a function, in part, of the resilience of the community's internal discourse networks - its mechanisms for communicating, arguing, and informing members about risks and the steps needed to mitigate them.