Transcending the Pandemic: Flood-Risk Communication for Risk Reduction in Davao City, Southern Philippines

Transcending the pandemic becomes a critical priority in all sectors of all government institutions.  Aside from the health institutions, another area which becomes a critical matter to consider is the management of disasters, specifically flooding. The challenge in any communication to be effective specifically in communicating flood risks relies on the efficient performance of inter-organizational integration with organizations and systems observing interoperability as the “ability of systems, units or forces to provide services to and accept services from other systems, units or forces and to use the services so exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together”. Communicating risk and managing flood-risks in a large city like Davao City are challenging tasks for policy and decision makers knowing that the current pandemic has its own restrictions in terms of maximizing the interoperability mechanisms in place. Disaster Risk Reduction and Management has to modify some of its strategies and this is where risk communication can play a very crucial role. Risk Communication Management can play the central role in risk management while transactional challenges in interoperability are being addressed to enhance the preparedness among the local communities. This paper presents the risk communication systems and protocols of Davao City reflecting the transmission process of flood-risk information and how it is cascaded to the local communities. It aims to describe the role of the institutional structures and communication system and the transactional processes involved in communicating risk information.  However, the current pandemic poses some challenges in the transactional process involved in DRR, especially in flooding.