## 1 Introduction
Awareness about natural hazards is of paramount importance to ensure a successful evacuation, and a lack of it can lead to increased number of casualties [14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19]. In order to ascertain the level of community awareness about such issues, the authors set out to conduct community mapping exercises amongst local residents in the municipality. Community mapping, an ethnographic tool inside human-centered design (HCD), is an interactive tool that has been developed in order to integrate the traditional knowledge and ideas of the people living within a community into the planning and development of an academic or business project [20; 21]. This methodology allows a local community to describe the numerous characteristics of an area (such as risk-prone or polluted areas) through vocal and visual representations that facilitate the understanding of the socio-environmental conditions of the settlement [22; 23; 24]. Participatory or community mapping is not defined by the level of compliance with formal cartographic conventions, and whereas regular maps seek conformity, community maps embrace diversity in presentation and content. In essence, participants are instructed to draw a physical map of their territory, highlighting different types of socio-environmental dimensions being impacted, and are actively encouraged to share their observations and rationale with the members of the research team. In the case study of Chanaral, the participants were instructed to highlight five aspects of their settlement, namely (a) tsunami risk areas, (b) flood risk areas, (c) critical infrastructure, natural resources and cultural sites, (d) evacuation areas and evacuations routes, and (e) polluted areas. These community mapping exercises were then contrasted with a tsunami hazard map obtained by conducting a numerical simulation of a worst-case earthquake scenario, as well as a flood map obtained from field surveys conducted in the aftermath of the 2015 event and reported in [PERSON] et al. [9]. The originality of the research thus lies in the combination of social science tools that establish the community's perception on a certain number of social issues, contrasting them with hazard maps, and allowing the authors to clearly identify the problems that underlie specific areas of the town. To the authors' knowledge, to date the coupling of community mapping and propagation and inundation simulations has not been used in tsunami risk mitigation, and represents an important way forward to attempt to improve the resilience of coastal communities and ensure their long-term sustainability. Essentially, through the present research the authors are attempting to validate whether a group of members of the community possesses enough awareness (when acting as a group) to be able to successfully contribute to discussions on how to improve the resilience in their settlement, through the process of HCD. Also, it is interesting to note how the present research attempts to understand risk perceptions regarding a severe and probably future risk (tsunami), which is markedly different in nature to the last two disasters affecting the community (river flood). This represents another novel aspect of the paper, in that typically awareness and preparedness studies tend to focus on recent events and how to prepare against similar future events.