wow! would you mind saying a little more about what risk communication is and what you like about it? it sounds so cool!
Sorry to answer this a full 5 months later but I have chronic bad-responding-to-things habits...I remember getting this around the beginning of the semester when I was talking about teaching risk comm for the first time, and then the East Palestine derailment and the Turkey earthquake happened so I went "oh I need to write a really in-depth and thoughtful response about the societal importance of risk communication"...aaand then I didn't oops 🤷♀️
But anyway, the short answer is that risk communication (as an area of research and as a practical discipline) shares a lot of DNA with science/environmental/health communication (and academics will have all sorts of fun arguing about how to classify them in relation to each other, ie "is risk comm a subfield of scicomm" or vice versa), but risk comm is explicitly oriented towards using what we know about communication (how people act, how they process information, the psychological/sociological/cultural/institutional influences on communication, etc) to help protect people and what they care about. "Risk" in this context is broadly defined as the "things, forces, or circumstances that pose danger to people or what they value," so very broadly looking at the ways people respond to uncertainty and danger. As a result, risk comm tends to take a very discipline-agnostic approach in looking for social science insights into risk-related problems, and also aims to bring together insights from across topical domains like climate change, health, natural hazards, etc rather than looking at them in isolation.
So for me personally, I think of myself as a risk comm person rather than scicomm or environmental, even though the underlying topics (renewable energy, climate change, earthquakes) that I study would fit me into either one, because it implies a particular perspective about what I'm trying to achieve and how I go about it.
