Track: B1. Empowering Resilience with Technology and Design

Background/Objectives

Nepal is one of the most disaster-prone countries in South Asia, owing to its turbulent geological and meteorological position. The peoples of Nepal have long been subject to recurring earthquakes, flooding, landslides, and a broad array of other hazard regimes, and many of these hazard regimes are growing more volatile due to the impacts of climate change. In the Himalayas, under certain conditions, these hazards combine to produce complex, cascading disasters that cause intense patterns of damage and losses within downstream communities and disrupt critical infrastructure. Human interventions, often in the form of new infrastructure projects, also can introduce new risk factors and patterns of vulnerability which may amplify the impacts of cascading disasters. Risk monitoring and EWS for specific kinds of disasters do exist throughout Nepal, but they are often limited in scope or focused on one region or a single hazard type. Other programs utilize approaches that are either too top-down or too bottom-up in orientation to achieve or sustain desired outcomes. As hazard regimes shift, new tools, modes of coordination, and interdisciplinary collaborations are needed to formulate scalable and sustainable EWS approaches. We aim to develop new systems that can augment and elaborate on existing systems while linking efforts across diverse sites and scales.

After a careful review of the state of the art for risk monitoring across a range of natural hazards, we have selected debris floods and extreme flow events as an initial lens for nationwide EWS in Nepal. Debris floods, like the 2021 Melamchi Disaster, are the result of cascading hazards with a high water content that tend to run-out across long distances causing extensive downstream damages. Predicting the likelihood and severity of debris floods and extreme flow events requires complex monitoring and assessment methods. Yet the complexity of contributing factors to debris floods offers the widest lens of features and conditions to observe, thus providing numerous opportunities for risk assessment and monitoring that might help to anticipate other kinds of potential hazards. Overall, our goal is to develop systems that can issue an effective prior warning and empower individuals at the state and community level to make the most informed and appropriate response to latent and emergent disaster risks. With this scoping study, we seek to gather our resources and sketch out the process by which we could collaborate with partners to create a useful toolkit for a nationwide EWS for debris floods and extreme flow events in Nepal. At all levels, we assert that it is critical to undertake a community-oriented approach: to consider the socialization of EWS tools and procedures, to engage the diverse communities they serve, and wherever possible to co-create the approach with local stakeholders. With these principles in mind, this report also outlines how we plan to build that toolkit in future phases of this project through a process of co-creation: working with partners at multiple scales including the Government of Nepal, other like-minded NGOs operating in Nepal with common interests and complementary skill sets, and communities and local institutions in disaster areas.

Approach/Activities

Results/Lessons Learned