The four parties, Nihon University's College of Crisis Management, the NPO Disaster Reduction Education Promotion Association, the Department of Comprehensive Dental Education at Kanagawa Dental University's School of Dentistry, and AR Disaster Prevention, have signed a comprehensive partnership agreement to promote the "Update Evacuation Drills!" project.
Although today's children are expected to survive in an age of frequent disasters, many of the evacuation drills conducted in educational and childcare facilities have remained almost unchanged for decades, except for tsunami evacuation. This situation is thought to be largely due to the overwhelming lack of knowledge and response capabilities regarding disasters that children have little experience of, and it is important for each individual to develop the "ability to predict danger" by imagining a situation closer to the reality of a disaster, and the "ability to avoid danger" by making the right judgments and taking the right actions according to the situation.
That's why four researchers, including Nihon University's College of Crisis Management, focused on evacuation drills. Evacuation drills are experiential disaster prevention education that people experience repeatedly from early childhood, and many Japanese people form their image of disasters through them. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these early experiences have a major impact on how people will act in emergencies. In other words, updating evacuation drills will raise the disaster prevention awareness of the entire nation, leading to more effective disaster prevention education. Conducting drills that are in line with the actual disaster situation will lead to safer evacuations and greater damage reduction.
Going forward, the four parties will work together and put the results into practice in educational and childcare facilities to collect and verify evidence regarding the effectiveness of disaster prevention education, establish standard evacuation drill methods, and promote efforts to update evacuation drills nationwide.
