Early warning for all – six key challenges

Making and communicating warnings that are reliable, timely and available to users at spatial dimension relevant to users is a challenge. Early warning relies on hydro-meteorological forecasting models that predict where and when extreme weather may strike. Science has advanced significantly, and many such models now help predict the weather around the globe for the next few hours and days to support forecasts of storms and floods through to the coming weeks and months to support forecasts of droughts, water scarcity and heatwaves. However, research and innovation are required to reduce uncertainty and increase resolution and relevance of forecasts.

Availability of data is a challenge. The data that underpins reliable early warning and forecasting come from networks of terrestrial stations that provide observations of rainfall, temperature, pressure, water levels, discharge and other variables. Additional observations come from remote-sensing data. But data is expensive, there are too few observation networks and many existing networks are deteriorating - particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where those most vulnerable to climate extremes live. This decline urgently needs to be reversed.

Reaching everyone on earth will require an enormous investment in expertise in early warning, from the global to the local level. While the USD 3.1 billion pledged at COP27 will help, sustaining this investment into the future will require institutional and political commitment that is often difficult to muster. Time and again excellent initiatives to strengthen early warning to the most vulnerable have fallen into disuse once project financing has run dry or trained experts have found better paid jobs elsewhere. Long term sustainability and human capacity must be assured.

To be effective, early warning needs to build on a thorough understanding of how people and their livelihoods are impacted by extreme weather events. What response options do they have? How do they take decisions within their social, gender, cultural, economic and political realities? The context in which a single mother in an informal dwelling on the outskirts of Nairobi decides how to act due to early warning information is quite different to that of a well-heeled young professional in an apartment in suburban Geneva. Understanding the multiple dimensions of vulnerability is essential.

Ensuring that everyone benefits from early warning once it reaches them, particularly the most vulnerable is a challenge. A subsistence maize farmer in the drylands of Zimbabwe can do little with an early warning for drought if seeds for more resistant crops are unaffordable. A maize farmer in the United States, in contrast, may have multiple options to choose from to reduce impacts of drought. Issues of inequity need to be addressed to avoid only the already advantaged benefitting.

Those that are reached by early warning will take decisions to act in advance of extreme weather by considering multiple knowledges. These include the scientific knowledge provided by early warnings, but also their own local and indigenous knowledges, as well as their perceptions and beliefs. Early warning research and practice needs to bring together expertise from social and climate sciences to co-create with users early warning systems that acknowledge these multiple knowledges. Ongoing research efforts are addressing this significant challenge, for example the European I-CISK project, which aims to innovate climate information services through integrating scientific and local knowledges. More is, however, needed to ensure that the early warnings this plan develops not only reach everyone, but that these are really used by everyone to reduce the impacts extreme weather has on them.

Micha Werner is Associate Professor in Drought and Flood Management at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and is coordinator of a major European research effort on the integration of local and scientific knowledge in climate services and early warning.