Opinion: Warnings can’t stop Rasuwa

Image: CUINAN, China News Service

Across South Asia, climate extremes are no longer exceptional events. They are becoming a defining feature of daily life. Yet, many people remain ill-equipped to understand to respond to the risks they face.

World Bank estimates that more than 750mn South Asians over half the region have been affected by at least one disaster in the past two decades, and projects regional losses will average around $160bn a year by 2030. Asian Development Bank warns that, on a fossil-fuel-intensive path, unchecked climate change could cut South Asia’s GDP by 1.8% by 2050, rising to 8.8% by 2100.

Meanwhile, globally, countries have reported a 113% increase in multi-hazard early warning systems over the past decade. These are designed to detect and provide warning for triggering hazards, for example, a drought leading to a flood.

The Global Status of Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems (2025) report by UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and World Meteorological Organisation says that more than 60% of countries now have such systems. But does having access to better info mean being better prepared?

Assessments on early warnings have noted that ‘risk knowledge’ remains one of the most underdeveloped pillars. The above report finds that countries with less comprehensive early-warning systems suffer disaster-related mortality nearly six times higher, with almost four times as many people affected, compared to those with substantial to comprehensive coverage.

While countries are disseminating climate and disaster info, it’s important to ask if people know what it means for them? Do they know whether they should evacuate, move livestock to safer ground, avoid a particular route, protect essential belongings, or simply stay indoors?

A warning that reaches a phone but does not translate into a clear decision is unlikely to save lives. This challenge is becoming greater as hazards are becoming more complex.

Part of this difficulty lies in the fact that hazards are more difficult to read now. The region is now more vulnerable to multi-hazards: those that compound over one another, or cascade when one hazard triggers another. This greatly increases the risk of people living on the frontlines where the impacts are felt the most.

Last week’s flood in Nepal’s Rasuwa district illustrates this challenge. It damaged infra, disrupted communities, and affected one of Nepal’s key trade corridors within a matter of hours. For many people, the challenge was not simply receiving info about a hazard, but understanding its implications and how risks could unfold across connected systems.

As climate extremes become more complex, warnings must communicate not only what is happening, but what consequences may follow and what action should be taken. Timely warnings are necessary to enable early action, particularly when risks are shaped by interconnected hazards that may not be immediately apparent. However, it is unfair to assume that people exposed to risk automatically know how to respond.

Risk literacy requires a systems approach with clear benchmarks for all those involved in responding to these risks. Such a systems approach would begin at both the national and local level, with protocols developed to support anticipatory action. While disaster authorities across the region already have clear thresholds, these need to translate downwards into municipalities, schools, community health centres, wards, and households.

In practice, that means each tier holding its own version of the threshold: a river level that tells a ward officer when to sound a siren, a school when to suspend classes, and a health centre when to move supplies and patients to higher ground.

WMO estimates that a warning issued just 24 hours ahead of a hazard can cut the resulting damage by around 30%. But only where it is understood and acted upon.

Understanding a warning is only the first step. People also need to know what actions should follow. Explaining hazard thresholds, impacts, and uncertainty in plain language helps translate forecasts into decisions, whether that means pre-positioning supplies, moving livestock, protecting assets, or suspending classes before floodwaters rise.

Our experience from Bhutan shows why these matter. In Sep 2024, communities along the Haa River experienced a sudden surge of high water with no rainfall overhead, provisionally traced to a possible cloudburst far upstream. To anyone reading the sky above them, there was no risk at all but the danger had already been set in motion in a valley they could not see.

Events like this cannot be anticipated by watching the rain gauge alone. They can only be anticipated where forecasts, observation, and local knowledge are stitched together. And where someone has already decided what to do the moment a trigger is met.

Examples from Nepal show that many communities at the frontline of these risks have now also institutionalised learning about these risks. In the flood-prone Karnali basin, community-based early warning paired with forecasting has stretched warning lead times from 2-3 hours to 7-8.

In Madhesh province, 13 municipalities from Lal Bakaiya Watershed recently pooled their own budgets to co-fund a shared community-based flood early warning system. Municipalities across the province have also experimented with gamified preparedness exercises, drawing the info gap closer by making mock drills more inclusive.

Warnings should clearly map actions for relevant authorities including forecasters, line ministries, and communities. Arrangements must be established before hazards occur – through clear communication protocols, action matrices, drills, simulations, education, and training. It is also necessary to evaluate the impact and usability of warnings post a disaster.

Lesson from Rasuwa, Haa, and Karnali is the same: warnings save lives only when people understand what they mean and institutions are prepared to act on them. The next frontier is not detecting the hazard – it is ensuring that when the warning sounds, everyone in its path already knows exactly what to do.

A version of this article was originally published in The Times of India.

Saswata Sanyal

Debabrat Sukla