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Speed and reliability – Florian Meißner on warning communications
On 9 June 2026, as part of the ongoing Science Tuesday series, Prof. Dr Florian Meißner examined the future viability of civil protection. Under the title ‘Improving warning communications for extreme weather, strengthening resilience’, he discussed how digital media and official warning infrastructures need to be designed to reach people quickly and reliably in an emergency. Florian Meißner, Professor of Digital Publishing in the Department of Media, also presented the European project AlertHub, which he leads.
Meißner began by highlighting the challenges facing warning communication against the backdrop of advancing climate change. As Europe is emerging as the fastest-warming continent and extreme weather is identified in the latest Global Risk Report as one of the greatest risks of the coming decade, effective disaster management is becoming increasingly important. Meißner cited the floods in the Ahr Valley (Germany) in July 2021, which claimed over 180 lives, and the floods in southern Spain in 2024 as key inspirations for his work. In both cases, inadequate or belated communication meant that local people were not informed of what to do or how to behave. Meißner subsequently analysed three typical core errors in practice: the failure to issue warnings, unnecessary warnings, or alerts that do not comply with existing best practices. In this context, he emphasised – particularly with regard to phenomena such as warning fatigue – that:
“The major challenge in warning communication lies in conveying the dynamics and uncertainty of weather events in such a way that warnings are understood as relevant to action, without (…) warning fatigue setting in.”
A recording of the presentation in English can be found on Youtube:
Prof. Dr Florian Meißner has joined Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in October 2025. He teaches the Bachelor’s degree programmes in Online Journalism and Online Communication, as well as on the Master’s degree programme in Media, Technology and Society. His research focuses on risk and crisis communication, digital publishing and journalism studies. He has been a member of the fz dkmi since 2025.
Further information about him can be found in Prof. Dr Florian Meißner’s short profile on the fz dkmi website and in his video interview on the Mediencampus YouTube channel.
Science Tuesday is a regular lecture series at the Mediencampus Dieburg, organised by the Institute for Communication and Media (ikum) and the Research Centre for Digital Communication and Media Innovation (fz dkmi). For many semesters now, the series has provided a platform for professors and researchers at h_da to present their research findings to students and fellow academics. The series is explicitly aimed at anyone interested, both within and outside Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.