Local Capacity Gaps Threaten Global Early Warning Push, Brazil Survey Reveals

A sweeping national survey of Brazilian municipalities has exposed a deep disconnect between the world’s most ambitious early warning initiative and the local governments expected to carry it out. The study, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, introduces a new analytical framework called the Implementation Capacity of Local Early Warning Systems, or ICLEWS, and applies it to an unprecedented dataset: responses from 2,289 of Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities, representing 41 percent of the country’s local governments. The findings suggest that the United Nations Early Warnings for All initiative, which aims to give everyone on Earth access to multi-hazard early warning systems by 2027, is overlooking the institutional realities that determine whether warnings actually reach and protect people at risk.

The research team, led by Victor Marchezini of Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, CEMADEN, argues that warning systems are not merely technical installations but long-term social processes embedded in public institutions. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Early Warnings for All initiative have driven measurable progress at the national level: the number of countries reporting multi-hazard early warning systems rose from 56 in 2015 to 119 in 2024. Yet 40 percent of countries, 76 in total, still report having no such systems, and far less is known about how warnings are implemented below the national level, where most disasters actually strike. More than 25 years ago, a United Nations working group concluded that in many countries the institutional capacity to develop local early warning systems simply does not exist. The new study demonstrates that this diagnosis remains painfully accurate.

Scientifically, the innovation lies in treating local early warning systems as public policy that requires two complementary forms of institutional capacity. Technical-administrative capacities cover the internal functioning of local disaster risk management agencies: their human, financial and material resources, risk maps, and access to forecasts and monitoring systems. Political-relational capacities capture governance, including coordination across sectors and levels of government, risk communication strategies, contingency planning, and the engagement of civil society. The ICLEWS framework measures both across seven dimensions: human resources, financial resources, risk mapping, weather and subseasonal forecasting with rainfall monitoring, risk communication, social participation, and local and regional warning system governance. These dimensions map directly onto the four internationally recognized warning subsystems: risk knowledge, monitoring and forecasting, communication and dissemination, and preparedness and response.

The data came from an online survey administered between March and July 2025 in partnership with civil defense units across Brazil’s 26 states. The questionnaire contained 41 questions on disaster preparedness, of which 16 were selected for the ICLEWS analysis. Responses were converted to ordinal values, normalized to a common zero-to-one scale using the min-max method, and aggregated with equal weights into dimension and capacity scores, following an adaptation of the OECD Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators. Kendall’s tau-b rank correlation was then used to explore the relationship between the two capacity types, an approach suited to ordinal data with non-normal distributions and tied values.

The central statistical result is a moderate positive association between technical-administrative and political-relational capacities, with a tau-b coefficient of 0.374. In practical terms, municipalities that score higher on staffing and resources also tend to score higher on communication, participation and governance, but the relationship is far from deterministic, confirming that the two capacities retain distinct analytical identities. The aggregate picture is sobering. Technical-administrative capacity recorded a median of just 0.356, with the middle half of municipalities ranging from 0.165 to 0.477, while political-relational capacity fared slightly better at a median of 0.422.

Beneath the aggregates, the human resource findings are striking. One quarter of local civil protection managers have less than one year of experience, and 8 percent report no prior experience at all. Some 22 percent of municipal civil defense units consist of a single officer, 16 percent have two members, and only about one third have more than five. Across the responding municipalities the survey identified 13,516 civil defense officers, but only one quarter hold permanent public service positions, meaning the rest are exposed to the job turnover that fragments institutional memory and disrupts warning operations. Financial capacity is equally fragile: only one quarter of civil defense units have their own budgets, with most relying on transfers from other municipal departments, federal or state programs, parliamentary amendments or donations. The authors note that similar patterns of fiscal dependence and unstable staffing have been documented in Indonesia, India, Malawi and Zambia, suggesting a global structural problem rather than a Brazilian peculiarity.

Risk mapping emerged as the most developed technical dimension, with 57 percent of civil defense units using municipality-generated risk maps, though one quarter of cities lack such maps entirely and only 14 percent use geotechnical suitability maps that could steer new construction away from hazard zones. Forecasting use is limited: 38 percent of respondents report using weather forecasts, but only 15 percent use subseasonal forecasts covering 10 to 30 day horizons, and 41 percent use rainfall monitoring. Notably, many respondents answered that they did not know whether their municipality used these tools, which the authors interpret as a sign that local officers may be unfamiliar with how to access available forecast products. On the political-relational side, only 32 percent of municipalities report operating a formal alert system, yet 69.5 percent rate their alert-issuing capacity as high or medium, a discrepancy the researchers attribute to reliance on informal channels such as social networks, WhatsApp groups and radio that officers do not count as official systems.

Perhaps most damning for the vision of people-centered early warning are the participation figures. Nearly one quarter of municipalities take no action at all to support people living in at-risk areas, and among those that do, only 11 percent act frequently. Just 6.4 percent of municipalities reported that their populations frequently participate in civil defense activities. Governance scores were the lowest within the political-relational dimension: 30 percent of cities have no contingency plan, and while plans exist for riverine floods in 47.5 percent of cases and droughts in 35.6 percent, only 7.9 percent have plans for heatwaves, an emerging and growing hazard. Even in a country with an extensive coastline, only about a quarter of surveyed coastal cities reported contingency plans for coastal erosion. Intermunicipal coordination, essential when hazards cross jurisdictional boundaries, is maintained by just 61 percent of municipalities.

The authors conclude that the Early Warnings for All initiative often disregards the profound institutional, territorial and fiscal inequalities among municipalities, particularly in the Global South, where global standards like multi-hazard and people-centered warning systems are formally adopted without the conditions for substantive implementation. Without stable financing, permanent staffing, access to forecasts, intermunicipal coordination and genuine social participation, they warn, local early warning systems will remain fragmented and operate below their potential to reduce losses, strengthen prevention and save lives. Institutional capacity, they argue, should be understood not as a fixed state but as a dynamic process, and international guidelines must be localized, adapted to local social realities and backed by sustained investment, or the universal early warning promise will falter precisely where it matters most: in the communities where disasters actually happen.

Subject of Research: Implementation capacity of local early warning systems and the localization of the Early Warnings for All initiative

Article Title: Implementation Capacity of Local Early Warning Systems: The Need for Localism in the EW4All Initiative

Article References: Marchezini, V., Oda, P. S. S., Ferreira, A. M., da Fonseca, M. N., Cotting, A. L. M., Dias, K. G. C., Sampaio, M. R. P., & Coura, C. M. (2026). Implementation Capacity of Local Early Warning Systems: The Need for Localism in the EW4All Initiative. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-026-00765-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13753-026-00765-3

Keywords: early warning systems, EW4All, disaster risk reduction, ICLEWS framework, institutional capacity, Brazil, municipal civil defense, multi-hazard early warning, risk communication, social participation, Sendai Framework, localism