Hamilton Bean and colleagues recently published "Mobile Public Warning in Japan and the United States: A Sister Cities Collaboration" in Frontiers in Communication.
Hamilton Bean and colleagues recently published "As part of a special issue on "Cross-Boundary Disaster Communication: Building Systems Thinking and Breaking Traditional Divisions in the Field," the study described how over the last decade, countries have adopted or expanded the use of cell broadcast systems to support mobile public warning for natural and human-caused hazards and disasters. Cell broadcast entails sending short messages simultaneously to multiple mobile devices in a defined geographic area.
Japan and the United States have pioneered the development of mobile public warning technology, yet both countries continue to experience problems with the nonuse, misuse, or misunderstanding of these systems.
To explore prospects for improving this situation, this study presents thematic analyses of official documents and transcripts from four Japan-U.S. meetings and workshops with researchers, officials, and residents in the “sister cities” of Yamagata, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, and Boulder, Colorado, USA. The study’s boundary-spanning, cross-national findings contribute new insights regarding the appropriate level of local adaptation versus global standardization of mobile public warning theory, policy, and practice.
These findings can aid officials who are increasingly relying on mobile public warning systems to help keep communities safe amid the intensifying impacts of climate change.
Read the open access article here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1518729/full