The recent experience of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for establishing a more effective decision-making chain (from the decision-makers to the stakeholders) and an improved communication strategy. This is in the light of reducing the probability that society will be found unprepared when facing the next crisis, of whatever nature it will be.

The project's main objective is to reduce the gap between the objective physical parameters of the probabilistic risk analysis (statistically estimated risk) and the subjective parameters of the perception of risk (subjectively estimated risk). This main goal will be achieved by developing a model that will define guidelines on good practices to prepare citizens, economic subjects, and political decision-makers for possible future environmental/natural crises to minimize the gap between statistically and subjectively estimated risk. We intend to propose adequate risk communication strategies considering human diversities in accessing and understanding information, heuristic processes, and the preconceptions widely involved in judgment estimates and operational decisions for formulating adequate nudging techniques. Because of the wide variability of society responsiveness to communication and the limited time of the project, we will focus our experiments only on selected decision-makers (Civil Protection agencies at national and local scale) and one of the most fragile parts of the population, represented by people with low literacy skills, elders, migrants and people with learning difficulties. They represent the part of the population affected by the so-called functional illiteracy, which is defined as the poor capacity of a person to use reading, writing, and calculation skills for his/her own and community development (UNESCO 2021; [8]). Descends that functional illiteracy has considerable negative effects not only on personal development but also in economic and social terms, especially when dealing with communication of probability of hazardous events. The "spatial" information component will be added, creating awareness maps.

To this end, the project's main goal will be pursued by accomplishing three cross-integrated work packages (WPs), which integrate the skills of the three Research Units (RUs). The three work packages are organized as follows:

WP1 - Probability analysis of selected hazards, considered individually or together (multi-hazard scenario);

WP2 - Perception assessment of potential risk by targeted decision-makers and population;

WP3 - Creation of a communicative model for better risk representation to targeted decision-makers and population.

The integration of the three work packages will contribute to the achievement of the project’s main goal, i.e., the production of a communication strategy (model) that reduces the gap between objective (statistical) risk and subjective (perceived) risk.