Brief communication: Inclusiveness in designing an early warning system for flood resilience

One of our partners, ARANTEC, published an article about early warning systems and a SMART approach:

• Shared understanding of the risks;
• Monitoring of the risks;
• Awareness;
• Response actions on Time.

Floods – together with other climate disasters – remain a huge problem and are becoming more destructive with widespread ecological, social, and economic impacts. Some areas are more at risk than others.

The article deals with inclusive approaches that are required to design suitable flood early warning systems (EWSs) with a focus on local social and governance context rather than technology. Experts assess potential approaches for facilitating inclusiveness in designing EWSs by integrating diverse contexts and identifying preconditions and missing links. They advocate the use of a SMART approach as a checklist for good practice to facilitate bottom-up initiatives that benefit the community at risk by engaging them at every stage of the decision-making process.

Read the whole article here.

Photo on Unsplash, by Jonathan Ford