Altamash Khan is a Field Correspondent, Know Disasters, and a Programme Coordinator for Collaborative Advocacy, Sphere India.
Disasters are interlinked, and the impacts of different types of disasters do not happen in silos. However, recognising their causes and effects on the regional and global scale leads to the development of early warning systems that can capture multiple hazards and cross-boundary impacts like health, energy, aviation and education sectors.
This article tries to understand some of the key challenges to Early Warning Services globally and advocate several measures to national and global government agencies, humanitarian agencies, and ways of partnering and engaging with the media so that greater resilience to weather and climate hazards can be achieved.
Early Warnings
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), “The primary objective of a warning system is to empower individuals and communities to respond timely and appropriately to the hazards to reduce the risk of death, injury, loss of property and damage. Warnings should convey the message across and stimulate those at risk to take action.”
To do this, one needs to collect and analyse data, package and disseminate early warnings, develop appropriate procedures and response matrixes to allow faster delivery, and share relevant information with stakeholders and actors to ensure people know what to do in emergency alert situations.
Background
Given the importance of the general success of climate adaption, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Secretary-General, Petteri Taalas, in September 2019 underlined that around 100 WMO Members out of 193 national and territorial meteorological and hydrological services around the globe do not have effective climate services or early warning systems. The same issue was highlighted by the UNDRR in its concept note for International Day for DRR 2021: “One area of deep concern when it involves climate change adaptation is the fact that only half of 193 WMO members have state-of-the-art early warning services that are vital to support adaptation in climate-sensitive sectors like health, water and agriculture. There are major gaps in weather observation systems in developing States.” This means that when disasters hit those countries, the impacts of climate change are causing more damage than in those countries where there are bonafide services.
Petteri Taalas had also pressed about the significance of Early Warning Services that “investing in climate services and early warning systems is critical if countries and communities are to meet the challenge of climate change”. He further emphasised the requirement for “mitigating climate change and aim at reaching the Paris targets between 2 and 1.5 degrees Celsius,” referring to the temperature increase limits embarked on the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to regulate global warming by curbing greenhouse gas emissions from industry, energy production, transport and other sources.
We must start paying a growing amount of attention to adaptation. A robust way to adapt to climate change is to invest in early warning services. Through this, we will be able to achieve greater resilience to weather and climate hazards, like floods and storms, and in the absence of which, can turn risks into economically-damaging disasters.
Challenges
People are experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change globally. Small and marginalised farmers and their families in developing countries are among the leading impacted groups scuffling with poverty and hunger due to low crop yields caused by significant changes in the temperature and rainfall. Although Early Warning Systems (EWS) are implemented in many parts of the world, they do not always translate into an emergency response from all individuals. There are cross-cutting issues behind this fact, including the inability to implement participatory mechanisms involving communities and addressing their concerns regarding warnings, insufficient preparedness and response levels of EWS, lack of DRR knowledge and practices among key stakeholders, inadequate gender and social inclusion across all stages of EWS, and gaps in institutional communication and collaboration. It arises out of technical and financial barriers that are forcing the developing nations to struggle with achieving efficient early warning mechanisms.
Key Advocacy Points
It is a given truth that climate change does not respect borders. It is a global problem that will only be solved with cooperation and collaboration across borders and worldwide. “Mitigation and adaptation go hand-in-hand as two equally important building blocks of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Adaptation is not only the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do to augment economic growth and create a climate-resilient world,” said Ban Ki-moon, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations. Early Warning Services aid climate adaptation that further helps in avoiding future losses, generates positive economic gains through innovation and delivers additional social and environmental benefits.
In the words of Bill Gates: “With greater support for innovation, we can unlock new opportunities and spur change across the global ecosystem. Adaptation is an urgent issue that needs support from governments and businesses to make sure those most at risk have the opportunity to thrive.”
WMO/Funding Agencies should:
- facilitate more international initiatives on climate services and early warning notably, in urban areas, which are vulnerable to multiple hazards, including floods, storms, heatwaves, sea-level rise and poor air quality.
- provide greater support for innovation to strengthen and improve the early warning service capability of underdeveloped countries and Small Island Developing States.
- share and transfer science and knowledge to enable actions.
National Governments and Agencies
The government must start setting out major investments in climate monitoring and information services. They can collaborate with WMO-hosted Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS), which focuses on least developed countries and Small Island Developing States. It implements US$20 million of CREWS funds across 40 countries to strengthen its early warning capacity.
The most important thing to communicate is to remember your audience. It is only by knowing and listening to your target market that you can successfully share messages with them. End-users of meteorological data and early warning systems include farmers, fishermen, communities, policymakers and the private sector.
NDMA/NIDM/Academic Institutions
Early warning services must work in coordination with partner agencies, ministries, the media and more, to ensure effective distribution and action based on climate information and early warnings.
- Development of national research, monitoring and evaluation capabilities, including assessment and early warning training
- Supporting national and regional institutions in data collection, analysis and monitoring of natural and man-made hazards
- Access to scientific and technological information, including information on modern technologies
- Education and awareness, including communication between universities and best practice programmes in the field of emergency management
- Organising training courses for local decision-makers and communities
- Bridging the gap between emergency relief and long-term development.
- Bridging the gaps between science and decision making and strengthening coordination and communication links.
Humanitarian Organisations
Identify challenges and strengthen EWS in your area. Humanitarian agencies, such as CSOs, are well-versed in local-level challenges and play a key role in solving them through appropriate solutions to community problems. Their solutions should include DRR awareness campaigns to educate communities and key officials; improved communication between vulnerable communities and local authorities; transforming the reactive community response system that relied on government officials to a risk-informed and self-prepared community response; gender inclusion and diversity in various categories of EWS; and mobilisation campaigns to build disaster resilience.
All efforts should meet the range of internationally-agreed objectives adopted by the international community since 2015 in an interlocking series of accords, including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the New Urban Agenda, and the Agenda for Humanity.
Sharing of Early Warnings
Early warnings should be multilingual and apply to a variety of platforms. They should include details of what to do in bad weather. Most importantly, they should be simple.
Principles of Early Warning Sharing
- Keep it simple.
- Create product and message agents. Make sure village leaders, regional leaders have early warnings and can activate local responses and spread other messages.
- Keep in constant touch.
- Create threat levels and types of alerts. For example, yellow, orange and red
- Integrate with other warning systems (earthquakes and health warnings).
- Create a public response plan (e.g. training, simulation, building awareness).
- Is the warning dissemination plan working without power?
- Is the dissemination/communication technology sustainable? Are you building a long-term dissemination strategy, meaning ten years or more?
- Create EWS response matrix.
Media Partnerships
There are several ways to partner with media to ensure the effective delivery of early weather alerts and other applicable climate data. These include:
- Journalist training events
- Public-private partnerships
- Paid media
- Earned media
- Press conferences and media advisories
References:
https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/Climate%20and%20Disaster%20Resilience/climate-info-and-ews-communications-toolkit.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420920312966#:~:text =The%20challenges%20identified%20about%20the,of%20political%20commitment%20and%20will%3B
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/invest-early-warning-deliver-climate-adaptation
