An integrated risk-based early warning system to increase community resilience against disaster

Abstract

The need to integrate Early Warning System (EWS) with Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) has long been recognized in several global forums. In the year 2006, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) proposed an Integrated Risk-based EWS (IR-EWS) by integrating four elements: (1) Monitoring and warning service; (2) Risk knowledge; (3) Dissemination and communication; and (4) Response capability. Nearly after two decades of the UNISDR proposal, our study finds that there are still gaps in making IR-EWS operational. Our study also finds that works on conceptualizing integration of resilience against disaster with EWS as part of DRR (in line with SDG-13) has not yet been started. Against this backdrop, in this study we developed an IR-EWS for flood termed as Dynamic Flood Risk Model (DFRM) which contains: (1) simple risk-based warning numbers which are easily understandable and communicable to the community, with risk considered as a proxy for resilience; and (2) capital-based action plans in relation to community capital to reduce disaster risk and increase community resilience against disaster. The DFRM is applied in two flood-prone districts in Bangladesh and found to be acceptable to the community with reasonable accuracy. The model is the customized version of flood for generic IR-EWS. This study can be considered as the first attempt of the next generation IR-EWS where risk is represented by simple warning numbers and where EWS (as part of DRR) can be applied to increase the resilience.