The role of Early Warning.
The role Early Warning Systems (EWS) can play in disaster risk reduction is now universally acknowledged. As an example the wide variations in the level of loss experienced during Hurricane Nargis, in May 2008, are widely credited to the role early warning played. In Bangladesh where effective EWS was in operation the death toll was 3,400. In Myanmar where it was not, the death toll was 84,537, with a further 53,836 missing.
More recently the greatly reduced loss of life caused by Typhoon Bopha, in the Philippines during December 2012 (418 deaths), was also attributed to early warning: “This time last year over 1,400 people died on Mindanao in a similar event, but this time big improvements in the early warning systems have saved many lives. More than 167,000 people have been evacuated to shelters.”
Such events and the early warning systems established to protect against them have been largely at the macro level and have concentrated on high tech/high cost approaches to mitigate against them. These are justified given the huge scale of the threats, the number of potential beneficiaries and the predictability and regularity of the climatic events they address.
For many however the risks faced are small scale and localized in comparison. Globally, localised flood or landslide, no matter how catastrophic for the communities concerned, can be statistically insignificant, particularly as aggregated data on such events is often never gathered. This can make the setting up of early warning systems seem unrealistic, particularly where the risk scenarios faced are complex and localized, and issues of system viability and sustainability seem daunting.
These are typical of the challenges faced in establishing EWS in Nepal.