This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: One evening in August 2025, a Pakistani shepherd, Abuzar Hussain, was tending sheep and goats on the mountain slopes of Shijar. At about 6 p.m., a thunderous roar shattered the silence of the valley.
Hussain could see a glacial flood headed toward his village and had minutes to react. He desperately climbed to a higher point on the mountain, where there was a mobile signal, so he could contact the village and the mosque could broadcast an alert over a loudspeaker. Hundreds of lives were saved by this phone call from a single man in a region where millions of dollars are invested in early warning systems.
This story captures something risk and crisis communication researchers have long known but that is not always built into a nation's emergency planning. It is not only official messages that are part of a community response to an impending disaster. Research shows that the sources that deliver information during emergencies, and their perceived credibility, can affect how people understand risks and act on them.
That gap between what people are told and what they trust is exactly what we set out to measure with other colleagues. As climate and health information researchers, we ran a series of surveys in Belgium, Germany, Poland and Florida in the U.S.—all places hit by major weather emergencies in 2024. Storm Boris caused deadly flooding across central Europe, while Hurricane Helene caused devastation in the southeastern United States.
These events made natural test sites for our new survey tool, designed to measure "information voids"—the gap between what people expect from flood information and what they actually experience. This could include knowing where and when to evacuate and knowing whom to believe. To measure this, we asked people to rate how much information they ideally wanted versus how much they actually received; how accurate they expected it to be versus how accurate it felt; which sources of information they trusted versus which ones they heard from; and, finally, which communication channels they preferred versus which they could access.
From their responses, we were able to calculate "void scores": the difference between the perceived ideal emergency alert and what was received. These were judged in terms of the quantity and quality of information received, the source of that information and the communication channel through which it was received. The bigger the difference between the ideal and received ratings, the bigger the void.
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