Can a Song Help People Prepare for a Hurricane?

By Emiliano Rodríguez Nuesch

During hurricane season, emergency agencies tell people to make a family plan, prepare supplies, protect their homes and follow official alerts. The advice is familiar and important. But information alone does not always lead people to prepare.

People may underestimate a risk they experience every year, distrust official messages or feel there is little they can do against a powerful storm. In these situations, effective communication must do more than explain the danger. It must also help people believe that their actions can make a difference.

In 2020, I worked with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and the World Bank to explore whether music could help.

We created Disaster Fighters, a song and music video featuring well-known Caribbean musicians and cricket players, including DJ Bravo, Daren Ganga, Stacy Ann King, Tafa Mi Soleil, Daren Sammy, Ricky T and Mr Killa.

Watch the Disaster Fighters music video:

The song encouraged people to prepare an emergency plan, gather supplies, protect their homes and help their neighbours. It used a simple sporting metaphor: hurricane season is something we can train for, and everyone has a role on the team.

The participating artists were already familiar and trusted voices in their communities. Their involvement helped the video reach around five million people across the Caribbean. But that reach left us with an important question: had the song changed anything beyond attracting attention?

Testing the impact

The campaign became the basis of my MSc research in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. Together with Ganga Shreedhar and Felipe Dominguez-Cornejo, I later developed the research into a study published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

We conducted an online randomised controlled experiment with 974 people from 11 Caribbean countries. Participants received one of three messages: an unrelated control message, a conventional written preparedness message or the Disaster Fighters music video.

We measured their intention to prepare, the immediate actions they took during the study and three psychological factors: their perception of hurricane risk, their trust in the message and their sense of self-efficacy—the belief that they could take useful action to reduce the impact of a hurricane.

The conventional text increased people’s intentions to prepare. The music video produced a similar increase, although its effect fell just short of the conventional threshold for statistical significance. Neither message produced a detectable increase in the immediate preparedness actions measured in the experiment.

Music was not a substitute for clear information, and turning instructions into a song did not automatically change behaviour. Its strongest effects appeared elsewhere.

Helping people feel capable of acting

People who watched the music video reported greater trust in the message and a stronger sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy was also significantly higher among those who watched the video than among those who read the conventional text.

This matters because people are more likely to prepare when they believe preparation is both possible and useful. A warning can raise concern, but concern alone may leave people feeling powerless. The music video helped participants feel that there were practical things they could do.

The two formats also generated different emotional responses. The song produced emotions such as hope, happiness, pride, safety and joy. The written message also generated hope and safety, but it produced more worry, fear and anxiety.

Fear can be useful when a storm is approaching and people need to act quickly. But hurricane preparedness messages are repeated year after year. Communication cannot depend only on making people afraid. It also needs to sustain attention, build trust and show that preparing is a shared and achievable task.

Different messages for different moments

Music and written instructions can play different roles within the same communication strategy.

Before hurricane season, music may help make a familiar risk feel relevant again. It can attract attention, start conversations and strengthen a sense of collective responsibility. When a storm is approaching, concise official messages are better suited to explaining exactly what people need to do, where they should go and when they should act.

The study also offered a broader lesson about evaluating communication. Five million views tell us that a message travelled widely. They do not tell us whether people trusted it, felt more capable of acting or took steps to prepare.

Creative communication should be evaluated with the same seriousness as any other intervention. The goal is not simply to make risk messages more entertaining. It is to understand how different forms of communication affect the psychological barriers that prevent people from acting.

Clear information tells people what to do. Trusted voices influence whether they listen. Music can help people connect emotionally with the message and feel that preparation is something they can do together.

The research was conducted by Emiliano Rodriguez-Nuesch, Ganga Shreedhar and Felipe Dominguez-Cornejo, in partnership with CDEMA and the World Bank. The findings were published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.