I don't have a good answer myself to the original question, but I was just thinking about the issue of trying to educate the public about various risks.

It is certainly a challenge. Whether you are a San Francisco emergency management official trying to educate the public about the dangers of earthquakes and the need to prepare, to a financial expert trying to educate and warn people about the need to save and invest money for retirement, to a scientist trying to communicate the risks of a long-running drought or global warming, to a doctor trying to warn a patient that they need to try and control their blood pressure, people just have a hard to time comprehending such important topics. We humans generally tend not to mentally deal well with events which are "large" or far in the future. Or sometimes things are too painful to want to deal with so we just ignore the problem and simply hope that we won't have to eventually deal with it.