A world where natural disasters and advances in technology are growing at similarly rapid rates has created the perfect storm for social scientist Sally Potter.
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Her research focuses on how people respond to warnings and forecasts on natural hazards such as floods, fires, cyclones and earthquakes.
"Then I work to make our forecast and warnings better and more effective in terms of people understanding how it's going to affect them and what they should do about it," she said.
And it's this impact-based warnings approach that has led her to explore what the future of warnings could look like.
Dr Potter believes there is strong potential for digital footprints to be harnessed to create personalised warnings for people in the path of potential disaster.
She said tech giants that already have a lot of our data could use artificial intelligence to create advice that enhances the more generic official warnings.
"They've got our demographic data, location data, they can see what's in our calendars, our social media, our online search and purchase histories," she said.
The senior social scientist with GNS Science New Zealand, who delivered the keynote address at a natural hazards research forum in Adelaide this week, said all of this information could be used to figure out how vulnerable an individual might be to an impending event and its impact.
"Let's say there's a big cyclone coming. They could overlay that with this risk information for each of us and that provides the trigger for that person to be warned, for example, about how their house might be affected," she said.
"So it might be at a different time to someone else, depending on how at-risk they are and also what their risk tolerance is. And you can figure out risk tolerance from things like how we respond to social media posts, articles that we read.
"Potentially ... the message could be tailored to us to reflect those different situations and provide more targeted advice as well."
Dr Potter says her theories on how companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta could use their data have every chance of becoming reality.
"Our data is already out there and it's already being used by these tech agencies to give us targeted advertising, the Netflix shows we might want to watch, and completing our Google searches," she said.
"And it might just happen reasonably quietly."
But she's so far had no response from tech giants as to whether this type of approach was being considered.
"It's hard to know what they're working on," she said.
"There's also the issue of them using the data for commercial gain rather than public good. We'll always need official government warnings."
In the meantime, she says there has been movement towards user-led preference approaches for warnings.
"Perhaps we can have a system where people put in their own data and preferences and that gets around issues like privacy and biases in algorithms.
"There could be an approach where it gives ownership of the data back to the people, and is more comfortable for government and scientific agencies to use."
The Adelaide forum, hosted by Natural Hazards Research Australia, included presentations from local and international experts on the latest disaster preparedness, response and mitigation research.
NHRA chief executive Andrew Gissing said it was an opportunity for knowledge sharing, collaboration and problem-solving in the disaster and emergency management sectors.
"It is vital that hazards research keeps up with the scale and pace of technological innovations," Mr Gissing said.
Australian Associated Press
