Early warning for all:

Early warning for all –

In just five years, early warnings for extreme weather - storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves – should reach everyone in the world. This ambitious plan was unveiled by UN Secretary-General António Guterres at COP27, which just concluded. With the frequency and severity of extreme weather increasing, the plan provides much-needed support to efforts to adapt to climate change. But for the plan to become reality, scientists, policymakers, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and communities must work together to tackle six key challenges.

Technology

Making and communicating warnings that are reliable, timely, and available to users at spatial dimensions 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 the resolution and relevance of forecasts.

Data

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.

Capacity and sustainability

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 an 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.

Social vulnerability

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 from that of a well-heeled young professional in an apartment in suburban Geneva. Understanding the multiple dimensions of vulnerability is essential.

Equity

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 of 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 the impacts of drought. Issues of inequity need to be addressed to avoid only the already advantaged benefitting.

Transdisciplinary

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