Scientists and policy makers issuing predictions and warnings of impending natural disaster are faced with two major challenges, that is, failure to warn and issuing a false alarm. The consequences of failure to warn can be serious for society overall, for example, significant economic losses, heavy infrastructure and environmental damage, large number of human casualties, and social disruption. Failure to warn can also have serious for specific individuals, for example, legal proceedings against disaster research scientists, as in the L'Aquila earthquake affair. The consequences of false alarms may be less serious. Nevertheless, false alarms may violate the principle of nonmaleficence (do no harm), affect individual autonomy (eg, mandatory evacuations), and may result in the "cry wolf" effect. Other ethical issues associated with natural disasters include the promotion of global justice through international predisaster technical assistance and postdisaster aid. Social justice within a particular country is promoted through greater postdisaster aid allocation to the less privileged.
There have been an increasing number of studies conducted on community preparedness, particularly on changing individual health behaviors in ways that minimizes individual risk to cope with the stress of a natural disaster. A variety of behavioral change theories and models used by disaster academics scrutinize the manner in which individual behavior is sought and transformed into disaster preparedness. This reflects the lack of knowledge about how these models identify certain behaviors regarding natural disaster preparation. This article seeks to address this lack of knowledge. It presents a set of health behavioral change models that can be used by scholars to comprehend variation in the nature and extent of individual disaster preparedness. The purpose of this study is to provide a review of the existing models on the subject, and also to present a comparative analysis of the models that may contribute to ways of understanding the investigation on natural disaster preparedness behaviors.