The research, conducted by Francisco Proença Garcia, Lucie Calléja and Raquel Duque at the Instituto de Estudos Políticos of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, examines how regional organisations can act as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts, using the African Union as its central case. The authors frame climate change not as a direct trigger of war but as a threat multiplier, a term borrowed from security analysis that describes how environmental stress interacts with poverty, inequality and weak institutions to raise the risk of instability. Their findings arrive at a moment when the climate-security debate is intensifying across Africa, a continent that spans the latitudes of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and faces heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms with increasing frequency and severity.

The conceptual foundation of the study reflects a hard-won consensus in the climate-conflict literature. Scholars increasingly agree that climatic shocks rarely generate violence in a linear fashion. Instead, they interact with exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, shaping social and political outcomes through pathways that are deeply context-specific. Quantitative research has yet to identify a robust, generalisable relationship between climate variability and armed conflict; climate-related stress is more likely to manifest as communal violence, protests or displacement than as full-scale war. The authors also cite a caution that is often overlooked: poorly designed responses to climate change, including securitised approaches to migration or mitigation projects that compete with local land use, can themselves become sources of conflict. This is why the study insists on conflict-sensitive climate governance that prioritises cooperation and prevention.

What makes regional organisations uniquely important in this landscape, the authors argue, is their position between the global and the local. Compared with global actors, bodies like the African Union offer greater contextual sensitivity and political ownership over risks such as droughts, floods and resource competition, whose impacts routinely cross borders. Since the mid-1990s, regional organisations have expanded from traditional diplomacy into preventive diplomacy, mediation, peace operations and post-conflict reconstruction. The African Union, formed in 2002 under the banner of African solutions to African problems, has built an ambitious peace and security architecture, including the Peace and Security Council and the Continental Early Warning System. Yet scholars caution against overestimating its operational capacity: dependence on external funding, sovereignty concerns and uneven political will among member states have long constrained outcomes.

To investigate how the AU translates climate-security awareness into practice, the team focused on the Africa Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Early Action System, known as AMHEWAS. Established in 2022 by the African Union Commission, AMHEWAS is designed to strengthen continental capacity for early warning across droughts, floods, extreme rainfall and other hydro-meteorological hazards. Its stated objectives include enhancing access to multi-hazard warning information at continental, regional and national levels, reducing disaster impacts through anticipatory action, supporting resilience in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and Agenda 2063, and improving interoperability across member states and Regional Economic Communities. Implementation is supported by the Italian Government in partnership with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the CIMA Research Foundation.

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative case study combining document analysis of AU policy documents, peace and security frameworks and official AMHEWAS reports with a structured questionnaire administered online between January and May 2026 to AU policymakers, technical experts, representatives of Regional Economic Communities and climate-security specialists. Respondents were identified through purposive and snowball sampling, and four responses were received, reflecting the access constraints inherent in research on active institutional programmes. The sample included two respondents affiliated with the AMHEWAS programme, a former senior official of a Regional Economic Community, and an academic expert in peace and security with policy engagement in AU governance. Responses were analysed through thematic coding organised around five categories: early warning, early action, institutional coordination, knowledge production and information sharing, and political constraints. The authors are candid that the results are exploratory rather than fully generalisable, but the consistency of insights across documents and interviews strengthens their reliability.

The technical architecture that emerged from this analysis is striking. AMHEWAS operates through a subsidiarity-based governance model in which the African Union provides strategic orientation and norm harmonisation, Regional Economic Communities serve as technical and operational interfaces, and member states retain primary responsibility for implementation on the ground. A Steering Committee provides strategic oversight while a Technical Working Group of experts from member states, UN agencies, civil society and academia refines methodologies. The system’s operational backbone includes a Continental Situation Room in Addis Ababa, a Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory Centre in Niamey, regional situation rooms in Nairobi under IGAD and Abuja under ECOWAS, and the first national situation room in Dodoma, Tanzania. These facilities run around the clock on standardised operating procedures, aggregating risk data and issuing continental watches and advisories.

At the heart of AMHEWAS’s ambition is a shift from hazard-based to impact-based forecasting, a paradigm that links meteorological hazards directly to their anticipated social, economic and infrastructural consequences. The approach operates across three analytical levels: hazard forecasts based on thresholds such as extreme rainfall predictions; impact-based warnings that qualitatively assess expected disruptions to populations and infrastructure; and impact forecasts that quantify affected people, damaged roads and inundated cropland. Operational tools include Flood-PROOFS East Africa, an impact-based river flood forecasting system for the Greater Horn of Africa that combines hydrological modelling with flood mapping and risk analysis, and the African Drought Watch, which provides monthly continental assessments. These systems draw on data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, including five-day discharge forecasts from the Global Flood Awareness System, and collectively reach an estimated 1.5 billion people.

Yet the study’s most compelling findings concern the gap between sophisticated forecasting and effective response. Respondents converged on four structural constraints: heterogeneous national capacities in human resources, technical infrastructure and hazard monitoring equipment across 55 member states; institutional fragmentation, with environment, agriculture and civil protection agencies operating in silos with poorly interoperable data systems; financial sustainability, with early warning systems dependent on external funding that respondents described as frequently motivated by disasters, reactive rather than anticipatory; and limited political ownership by member states, which reduces the operational impact of alerts and constrains investment. On the cultural front, one respondent noted that many administrations are accustomed to communicating danger in generic terms rather than expected impacts, and that changing this logic requires training, analytical depth and clear protocols.

The relationship between AMHEWAS and the Continental Early Warning System emerged as one of the most analytically significant dimensions of the research. CEWS, a pillar of the African Peace and Security Architecture, maintains a mandate of conflict anticipation directly supporting the Peace and Security Council, while AMHEWAS addresses natural and hydro-meteorological hazards. One respondent described the complementarity in institutional terms: CEWS ensures the political-security reading and direct linkage to the Peace and Security Council’s decision-making mechanisms, while AMHEWAS adds a multi-risk analysis that allows anticipatory identification of factors of instability before they materialise into crises. Collaboration between the two systems has existed since AMHEWAS’s inception, with knowledge exchanges and training in 2021 enriching the design of multi-hazard advisories. But respondents also flagged that CEWS has suffered from institutional restructuring that effectively downgraded the system, and that persistent limitations in coordination, data sharing and activation mechanisms continue to constrain integration. Looking ahead, one respondent identified the Extraordinary Conference of Luanda, scheduled for August 2026, as a decisive political moment to drive structural decisions on the coherence, complementarity and operationalisation of early warning systems on the continent.

Ultimately, the study argues that the existence of sophisticated forecasting tools does not automatically generate preventive responses. What determines operational effectiveness is the credibility of alerts, the clarity of communication, the existence of predefined institutional protocols linking alert levels to concrete measures, and the availability of anticipatory financing. Respondents emphasised that trust in the quality of data, resulting from the integration of information on hazards, exposure and vulnerability, is a sine qua non condition for mobilising resources and activating responses. They also highlighted the role of traditional and local knowledge, noting that collaboration with traditional and local authorities enhances early action by ensuring warnings are contextually meaningful. Training has been delivered to representatives from 37 AU member states across five Regional Economic Communities, with national situation rooms planned or in process in Tanzania, Namibia and Ethiopia. The authors conclude that the African Union adds value by coordinating, setting standards and integrating knowledge across levels of governance, but that the challenges facing AMHEWAS are not only technical but fundamentally political and institutional. As climate-related events rise in frequency and impact across the continent, the credibility of anticipatory systems will be measured not by the sophistication of the alerts they produce but by the collective capacity to act preventively, coherently and consequentially before crises materialise.

Subject of Research: The role of the African Union and its AMHEWAS early-warning system in preventing climate-related conflicts through regional peacebuilding governance.

Article Title: The role of regional organisations as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts: the case of the African Union

Article References: Proença Garcia, F., Calléja, L., & Duque, R. (2026). The role of regional organisations as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts: the case of the African Union. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1894679. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1894679

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1894679

Keywords: African Union, climate security, AMHEWAS, early warning systems, peacebuilding, climate-related conflicts, regional organisations, anticipatory governance, drought, flooding, Sendai Framework, impact-based forecasting

That is the central argument of a major new perspective paper published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences. An interdisciplinary team led by Philip J. Ward of the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, together with Marleen C. de Ruiter, Kees Boersma, Jasper Verschuur, Nicole van Maanen and more than a dozen colleagues spanning climate risk, public health, behavioural science, crisis management and disaster governance, sets out five core challenges that stand between today’s fragmented risk research and what the United Nations has called Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management, or CRM. The paper, published as an invited highlight contribution, arrives in the wake of the Sendai Framework’s Mid-Term Review, which concluded bluntly that science is falling short in understanding complex multi-risks.

The authors’ starting point is a conceptual shift that has gathered momentum over the past decade. Risk, as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines it, is a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Traditional assessments treated these ingredients as static, studying each hazard in isolation. Researchers now recognise that hazards interact, triggering, amplifying or compounding one another, and that exposure and vulnerability themselves evolve over time, sometimes for decades. Slow-onset crises such as droughts and pandemics erode financial resources, education, health and social networks, while rapid-onset events like floods and earthquakes displace people into new exposures. A person displaced by flooding may encounter vector-borne disease; a community enduring an outbreak may face heightened exposure because its drinking water infrastructure has been damaged.

The links between climatic hazards and infectious disease are particularly striking. Flooding and high temperatures can expand breeding grounds for mosquitoes, amplifying malaria and dengue transmission, while floodwaters spread the bacteria responsible for cholera. A systematic review cited in the paper found that 58 percent of all known human infectious diseases, including Zika, Chikungunya and Ebola, have been aggravated by climatic hazards through more than 1,000 unique transmission pathways. Yet disaster risk models almost never include biological hazards, and health systems rarely plan for geophysical and meteorological shocks, leaving what the authors describe as double or even triple health burdens when physical injury, disease and mental health impacts coincide.

The first of the five challenges is observational: we lack comprehensive, high-quality data on how societies are impacted by, prepare for, and respond to multi-risks. Health scientists curate disease data, hydrologists curate flood and drought data, and seismologists curate earthquake data, each in disciplinary silos with incompatible standards. Spatial and temporal scales rarely match, so urban heat islands, flash floods and informal-settlement vulnerabilities fall below the resolution of global datasets. Vulnerability is captured in episodic snapshots such as censuses that quickly go stale, while impact databases like EM-DAT record only aggregated, largely tangible losses, overlooking mental health, social cohesion and long-term path dependencies. In many low- and middle-income countries, the sustainability of health information systems itself is threatened by budget cuts to external funding.

The second challenge follows directly: our understanding of why people, communities and institutions prepare, or fail to prepare, for complex multi-risks remains incomplete. Classic theories such as Expected Utility Theory, Prospect Theory, the Theory of Planned Behaviour and Protection Motivation Theory were largely built for single hazards and one-time decisions. In a multi-hazard world, households facing frequent floods and rare earthquakes may misallocate scarce resources, or conversely, experience with one risk may raise awareness of another. Systemic risks transmitted through food prices, supply chains and disease outbreaks compound the problem, because people perceive remotely materialising risks differently from local ones. Most empirical studies capture a single snapshot, so feedback loops between protective behaviour and declining risk perception remain theoretically hypothesised but empirically unverified.

Third, the capacity to simulate how current and future risk could be reduced is hampered by these observational and behavioural gaps. A review of roughly 70 large-scale risk models found that only two included dynamic vulnerability. Agent-based models and system-dynamics approaches have advanced for single hazards such as floods, droughts and outbreak response, but little work extends them to multi-risk settings. Validation is another bottleneck: disasters are inherently local processes, yet validation data arrive as coarse aggregates, leaving low-probability, high-impact events, which climate change may intensify, dangerously under-constrained. The authors call for simulations that couple hazards with dynamic exposure, vulnerability and human decision-making across societal groups, enabled by high-performance computing and richer empirical foundations.

Fourth, governance structures often reinforce the very silos that plague data and models. Mandates overlap or leave gaps when risks interact, political and budgetary cycles favour short-term action, and operational institutions are organised in isolated pillars that slow decision-making. Public participation, where it exists, is frequently semi-formal and structurally weak. The authors advocate poly-centric and net-centric governance approaches: adaptive, networked arrangements that distribute authority vertically and horizontally, connect state and non-state actors, and support collective sensemaking, with digital infrastructures for data interoperability and innovations such as citizen climate assemblies as potential test beds for deeper engagement.

The fifth challenge concerns knowledge exchange at the science, policy and practice interface. The multi-risk problem is, in the authors’ words, super wicked: complex, evolving and without definitive solutions. During the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, biomedical advice dominated early scientific guidance while social and economic perspectives were added later in parallel structures, illustrating how advisory architectures can entrench compartmentalisation. Research from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic contexts travels more readily into policy than locally grounded and tacit knowledge, reinforcing epistemic injustices and blind spots about marginalised groups. Knowledge translation is often treated as linear dissemination rather than dialogue and co-production, and even co-located disciplines fail to integrate without deliberate frameworks and boundary objects such as participatory maps, outbreak scenarios and serious games.

Looking forward, the team sketches an ambitious agenda built on five pillars: a Disaster Risk Observatory integrating satellite imagery, census data, surveys and disaster forensics into a living system that tracks risk dynamics in near real time; a new generation of risk-behaviour theories incorporating learning, feedbacks and systemic interdependence; integrative modelling frameworks, notably agent-based, that are optimised locally but scalable globally; poly-centric governance for sharing actionable multi-risk data and models; and systematic study of the science-policy-practice interface itself, supported by knowledge brokers who span disciplinary and administrative boundaries. Crucially, the authors stress that the five challenges are mutually reinforcing, each compounding the others into a persistent actionability gap. Closing it, they argue, will require funding mechanisms and research efforts that reach well beyond the traditional one-to-four-year project cycle, engaging meaningfully with the Sendai Framework, the WHO Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Framework, and the global climate agenda.

Subject of Research: Comprehensive disaster and climate risk management and the scientific challenges of multi-risk assessment

Article Title: Invited Perspectives: Science for Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management

Article References: Ward, P. J., de Ruiter, M. C., Boersma, K., Cesuroglu, T., Clark, N., Comes, T., Dahal, A., Fransen, S., Verschuur, J., Anthonj, C., Balakrishnan, S., de Bruijn, J., Hendriks, E., Mena Fluhmann, R., Perlaviciute, G., Steg, L., van den Homberg, M. J. C., van Westen, C., Atun, F., … van Maanen, N. (2026). Invited Perspectives: Science for Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 26(9), 4589-4609. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-4589-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/nhess-26-4589-2026

Keywords: disaster risk management, climate risk, multi-hazard, cascading disasters, infectious disease, vulnerability dynamics, agent-based modelling, disaster governance, Sendai Framework, risk perception, knowledge exchange, Haiti earthquake

The paper synthesises discussions from the 3rd International Conference on Natural Hazards and Risks in a Changing World, held in Amsterdam on 12–13 June 2024 and organised by the MYRIAD-EU project, RISK-KAN, and the NatRiskChange research training group. Roughly 280 scientists and practitioners attended, spanning 14 specialised sessions. The organisers also surveyed 86 participants before the meeting, about 40 percent of attendees, asking them to name the biggest impediments to understanding and managing multi-hazard risks over the next five years. Respondents, two-thirds of whom were early career researchers, repeatedly pointed to funding constraints, data limitations, fragmented governance, and poor communication between science and practice. The team then conducted an inductive thematic analysis of session reports and a post-conference expert consultation, distilling the material into four perspective themes aligned with the gaps identified in the Sendai Framework’s 2023 Mid-Term Review.

That Mid-Term Review delivered a sobering verdict. Most of the framework’s seven global targets are unlikely to be met by 2030, with particular shortfalls in reducing the number of people affected by disasters, economic losses, and damage to critical infrastructure. Progress has been made on expanding early warning system coverage and international cooperation, but the review found a persistent failure to prevent the creation of new risks, as disaster impacts continue to rise in absolute terms despite growing investment in risk reduction. The authors of the new paper cluster the implementation gaps into three interlocking problems: persistent knowledge and data gaps, fragmented governance across scales and sectors, and insufficient resources and capacity. Crucially, these problems reinforce one another. Knowledge gaps justify siloed approaches, siloed governance suppresses demand for integrated knowledge, and resource constraints block both knowledge generation and governance reform.

The first perspective theme addresses assessments and tools for resilient decision-making. The authors highlight narrative-based scenario methods known as storylines, which describe plausible ways that risks might unfold under different social, environmental, and policy conditions. Because storylines can blend qualitative and quantitative data and be co-created with communities, they offer a way to communicate complex multi-risk interactions to non-specialists. The British Geological Survey maintains an online repository of storylines and storymaps designed for exactly this kind of public engagement. The paper also catalogues a growing ecosystem of decision-support platforms: RiskScape, an open-source engine for assessing risks from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and floods; CLIMADA for climate risk and adaptation modelling; the MYRIAD-EU dashboard for multi-hazard scenario generation; and DAPP-MR, which uses interactive visualisations of dynamic adaptation pathways to support multi-risk decisions under uncertainty. Platforms such as FloodAdapt incorporate citizen input to guide local interventions and promote equitable recovery.

Yet the authors caution that sophisticated tools often remain confined to expert users, limiting their uptake by decision-makers and communities. They recommend co-developing tools with end-users from the outset, establishing interoperability standards and open-access repositories, and investing in boundary organisations and knowledge brokers who translate between scientific, policy, and community contexts. Data governance emerges as a central obstacle. Satellite datasets from national space agencies arrive in multiple formats with inconsistent documentation, proprietary insurance risk models keep their methodologies opaque, and institutional competition for funding discourages data sharing across organisations. The paper notes that some valuable products, such as NASA’s high-definition VIIRS Black Marble nighttime light data, remain restricted to collaborators on funded projects. It also flags a paradox for critical infrastructure: detailed data are essential for modelling interdependencies, yet publishing them can expose vulnerabilities, particularly for energy grids facing hybrid threats.

The second theme confronts what the authors call complex risk landscapes, where systemic risks amplify through cascading impacts, compounding effects, contagion, and feedback loops. Recent events illustrate the stakes. The 2024 Swiss floods and landslides showed how interconnected vulnerabilities can trigger cascading failures, while research on East Africa’s alternating droughts and floods has traced how ethnic conflict, food insecurity, and health crises compound into economic disruption. A core methodological challenge is deciding where to draw system boundaries, whether to analyse a triggering event or whole-system dynamics, and how to balance quantitative and qualitative methods. Temporal complexity compounds the difficulty: climate hazards tend to shift gradually, while socioeconomic vulnerabilities can change abruptly after policy shifts or economic shocks. Standard vulnerability assessments typically fail to capture these dynamics, and longitudinal post-disaster surveys, which are essential for understanding recovery trajectories and persistent mental health effects, remain scarce.

To support integrated decision-making for systemic risks, the authors point to emerging frameworks such as the Risk-Tandem Framework, which structures stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production to bridge gaps between risk science, policy, and practice. They also advocate agent-based modelling to simulate environmental and social interactions, causal network analysis to map risk drivers and tipping points, and Bayesian networks that incorporate stakeholder perceptions into assessments. A persistent institutional barrier is the siloed relationship between disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, which remain largely separate communities despite deep thematic overlap. The paper argues that frameworks like the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement’s Global Goal on Adaptation are beginning to bridge these divides, but that further scientific support is needed to make coordination operational rather than aspirational.

The third theme examines emerging technologies, and here the tone is both excited and wary. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can now process vast, multi-dimensional datasets capturing the interplay of multiple hazards, sometimes in real time. Long short-term memory networks support rapid-onset predictions for floods and landslides, gradient-boosting models such as XGBoost are used for drought and food security forecasting, and natural language processing tools mine policy documents and media to quantify hazard impacts. Earth observation combined with AI enables high-resolution exposure assessments, and digital twins, virtual replicas of cities and infrastructure synchronised with sensor and satellite data, allow stakeholders to simulate disaster scenarios in near real time. Crowdsourced efforts such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and drone-based rapid assessments fill critical data gaps from the bottom up.

But the authors are emphatic that these technologies carry risks of their own. AI systems trained predominantly on data from high-income countries may perform poorly in data-scarce regions, creating warning gaps precisely where vulnerability is highest. Temporal biases underrepresent short-duration, high-magnitude events, a limitation made vivid by Hurricane Helene’s 2024 flooding in the southeastern United States, which struck small, steep, poorly observed mountain watercourses and led to major underestimation of high-end flood risk. Computational demands and costs can exclude researchers in resource-constrained settings, potentially widening global inequalities in disaster risk management capacity. The paper calls for responsible AI frameworks that prioritise interpretability, establish accountability when systems fail, integrate uncertainty quantification, and ensure that AI complements rather than replaces local and indigenous knowledge.

The final theme tackles multi-level governance, where the Mid-Term Review found persistent fragmentation: local authorities lack capacity, national frameworks fail to meet local needs, and global policies rarely translate into enforceable local action. The authors recommend statutory coordination mechanisms specifying mutual obligations between governance levels, partnership funding requiring co-financing across scales, and dedicated boundary-spanning roles connecting local to national actors. Nature-based solutions, from ecological security patterns at regional scales to stormwater management at the site level, exemplify how participatory, multi-stakeholder processes can deliver risk reduction alongside health, food, and water benefits. On early warning, the UN’s Early Warnings for All initiative offers a pathway toward all-of-society engagement, but few countries have anticipatory action plans or functioning multi-hazard early warning systems, and many depend on unsustainable external funding. Forecasting multi-hazard events remains especially hard when geophysical hazards with deep uncertainties, such as earthquake-triggered tsunamis or volcano-earthquake interactions, demand fundamentally different lead times and communication strategies than mature hydrometeorological systems.

As the 2030 deadline approaches and negotiations over a successor framework begin, the paper’s central message is that effective disaster risk reduction requires both incremental technical improvements and fundamental shifts in governance, data sharing, and inclusive engagement. The authors acknowledge structural obstacles, including power asymmetries embedded in institutions and disciplinary silos perpetuated by academic incentives. Still, they map their recommendations directly onto the Sendai Framework’s four priorities, from integrated methodologies for understanding risk to participatory early warning indicators for preparedness and recovery. Their survey respondents shared a common conviction: progress hinges on institutions capable of long-term investment in knowledge generation, and on bidirectional exchange between research and practice. With climate change intensifying extremes and societies growing more interconnected, the authors argue that the next global framework must treat multi-hazard thinking not as an optional refinement but as the foundation of disaster resilience, supporting the broader Sustainable Development Goals through enhanced societal resilience.

Subject of Research: Multi-hazard disaster risk assessment and management in the context of the UN Sendai Framework

Article Title: Multi-hazard risk assessment and management: pathways for the Sendai Framework and beyond

Article References: Tiggeloven, T., Raymond, C., de Ruiter, M. C., Sillmann, J., Thieken, A. H., Buijs, S. L., Ciurean, R., Cordier, E., Crummy, J. M., Cumiskey, L., De Polt, K., Duncan, M., Ferrario, D. M., Jäger, W. S., Koks, E. E., van Maanen, N., Murdock, H. J., Mysiak, J., Nirandjan, S., … Ward, P. J. (2026). Multi-hazard risk assessment and management: pathways for the Sendai Framework and beyond. Geoscience Communication, 9(2), 185-221. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-185-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-185-2026

Keywords: multi-hazard risk, Sendai Framework, disaster risk reduction, systemic risk, early warning systems, artificial intelligence, earth observation, digital twins, climate adaptation, governance, storylines, vulnerability

The study’s technical foundation rests on the latest generation of global climate models, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6, known as CMIP6. Rather than relying on a single simulation, the team integrated outputs from five models—MRI-ESM2-0, EC-Earth3, IPSL-CM6A-LR, CESM2, and HadGEM3-GC31-LL—and downscaled them to a resolution of 0.25 degrees, fine enough to distinguish rainfall patterns across districts of northern Ghana. Because raw global models often carry systematic biases in the tropics, the researchers applied bias correction before feeding the projections into their drought assessment, a step that materially improves the reliability of regional rainfall and temperature estimates.

Validation of the model ensemble against observed reference datasets showed strong performance. For annual precipitation, the corrected models achieved a correlation coefficient of 0.95 with a root mean square error of 3.4 millimetres, while temperature simulations were even tighter, with correlations of 0.99 and errors ranging from 0.47 to 0.74 degrees Celsius. These figures matter because drought vulnerability modelling is only as credible as the climate inputs beneath it. A model that misrepresents the baseline climate will misrepresent the future, and the high validation scores give the projections a firmer empirical footing than many earlier regional assessments.

On top of the climate projections, the researchers deployed a battery of drought indices, each capturing a different face of water stress. The Standardized Precipitation Index tracks rainfall deficits against long-term averages; the Reconnaissance Drought Index balances precipitation against atmospheric demand; the Normalized Difference Drought Index draws on satellite reflectance to detect vegetation stress; and the Soil Moisture Index measures water actually available in the ground. By combining these indices with MODIS satellite-derived vegetation greenness, population density, and land use and land cover data within a geographic information system, the team generated composite vulnerability maps that integrate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity at the district scale.

The projections were run across three time horizons—2026 to 2050, 2051 to 2075, and 2076 to 2100—under two emissions scenarios. SSP1-2.6 represents a low-emissions pathway consistent with ambitious global mitigation, while SSP5-8.5 describes a fossil-fuel-intensive future. The spread between these scenarios frames the range of possible outcomes, and in both cases the direction of travel is the same: hotter, drier, and more drought-prone. Mean temperatures in the region are projected to rise by 2.0 to 3.9 degrees Celsius by 2100, while rainfall could decline by as much as 19 percent, a combination that compounds water stress through both reduced supply and increased evaporative demand.

The consequences for staple crops are stark. Maize, the region’s most important cereal, shows the strongest negative correlation with drought severity of any crop examined, with a correlation coefficient of −0.72 at a statistical significance level below 0.01. Mann-Kendall trend tests, applied at the 95 percent confidence level, confirm that these yield declines are part of a coherent trend rather than random year-to-year noise. Millet and sorghum, traditionally more drought-tolerant, fare somewhat better in relative terms, but the projected 25 to 60 percent yield losses across all four crops by mid-century would represent a fundamental shock to food production systems that already operate close to the margin.

The vulnerability mapping reveals why the human stakes are so high. Roughly 84 percent of the study area is classified as highly vulnerable to drought, a verdict driven less by climate exposure alone than by the region’s limited capacity to cope. More than 80 percent of agricultural production depends on rainfall with no irrigation buffer, over 49 percent of households already experience food insecurity, less than 23 percent of available cropland is under cultivation, and water bodies cover under 5 percent of the landscape. Each of these indicators points to a system with almost no slack: when the rains fail, there is little infrastructure, stored water, or diversified income to absorb the shock.

The authors are candid about the uncertainties that remain. Precipitation projections in the Sahel and West Africa are notoriously difficult, and the five CMIP6 models show divergent rainfall trajectories, with some models even displaying conflicting temperature trends in certain periods. These disagreements do not undermine the overall signal of increasing drought severity, which is consistent across the ensemble, but they do complicate the task of predicting exactly when and where the worst impacts will land. The study’s multi-model, multi-index approach is partly a response to this problem: by triangulating across models and drought metrics, the researchers aim to distinguish robust findings from model-specific artefacts.

What distinguishes this work from many climate impact studies is its insistence on connecting biophysical modelling to livelihoods. Drought indices and yield correlations describe the hazard, but the composite vulnerability maps place that hazard alongside the social and economic conditions that turn a dry spell into a hunger crisis. The framework is designed to be replicable at the district level, giving local planners a tool to identify which communities need intervention first, rather than waiting for national averages to obscure acute local distress.

The policy implications are pointed. The study calls for district-level drought preparedness planning, expansion of solar-powered irrigation to break the dependence on rainfall, index-based crop insurance to transfer residual risk, and the promotion of climate-smart agricultural practices such as drought-tolerant varieties and soil moisture conservation. It explicitly aligns these recommendations with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, arguing that drought resilience in northern Ghana should be treated as a disaster risk governance priority, not merely an agricultural problem. Without such measures, the modelling suggests, a region that contributes little to global emissions will bear some of their heaviest consequences, with crop failures ripening into food insecurity for hundreds of thousands of farming households well before the middle of the century.

Subject of Research: Drought vulnerability and crop production impacts under climate change in northern Ghana

Article Title: Drought vulnerability assessment and its severe impact on crop production and livelihood of people: An empirical modelling of northern Ghana

Article References: Kofitio, T. F., Amoatey, P. K., & Asenso, E. (2026). Drought vulnerability assessment and its severe impact on crop production and livelihood of people: An empirical modelling of northern Ghana. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001038. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001038

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001038

Keywords: drought vulnerability, northern Ghana, CMIP6, crop yields, food security, rain-fed agriculture, climate projections, Standardized Precipitation Index, maize, Sendai Framework, climate-smart agriculture, semi-arid regions

The starting point of the analysis is a deceptively simple observation: hazards are not evenly distributed across the globe, and neither is attention. Some regions have built deep expertise in the one or two threats they face most often, while other potential hazards go unmanaged entirely. The all-hazards approach, formally born in the late 1970s when the United States National Governors’ Association articulated the principles of comprehensive emergency management, was meant to fix exactly this blind spot. The idea was that governments at every level should prepare for and respond to all kinds of hazards rather than treating each threat in isolation. In practice, the United States could not fully implement the approach until the 1980s, and even then regions clashed over how to apply it, with law enforcement officials and firefighters sometimes disagreeing within the same jurisdiction about how a common plan should work.

Today, the vocabulary of all-hazard management, sometimes called multi-hazard, all-risk, or societal resilience management, appears in national strategies around the world, and globalization has spread emergency management information across borders faster than ever. Yet the review finds that the field still has not addressed the concept comprehensively. Researchers have repeatedly shown that existing practices fall short on interagency coordination, resource allocation, decision-making, stakeholder communication, policy implementation, and institutional learning. Alternative proposals, such as emphasizing functional management of communication and transportation systems across all hazards, have helped, but the gap persists. Among all hazard families, the review argues, wind is where the gap is widest, because practitioners discuss air pollution, hurricanes, and wildfires while disregarding wind direction as a meteorological driver, pollinator decline as an ecological disturbance, and localized indigenous wind phenomena such as gap winds and dust devils.

The scientific framing here matters. The study treats all wind hazards as climatological hazards generated by atmospheric processes rather than as isolated variables. Damaging winds arise from interactions among boundary-layer dynamics, surface roughness, land-sea thermal contrasts, synoptic circulation, convective instability, and wind-field variability. Wind itself is simply air moving from high-pressure to low-pressure areas, and the larger the pressure difference, the faster it moves, but that moving air also carries pollutants, moisture, heat, and pollen. Recent climate science has reinforced how much long-term atmospheric circulation patterns, shifting thermal gradients, and regional climate variability control the frequency, intensity, and geography of hazardous wind events, which means effective management must combine short-term meteorological forecasting with long-term climate adaptation. Empirical and modeling studies now allow intensity, persistence, direction, and circulation patterns to be quantitatively analyzed through observational datasets, synoptic climatology, and numerical modeling, giving hazard managers a far more robust scientific foundation than a decade ago.

To organize the evidence, the review distinguishes two analytical categories. External hazard-oriented management addresses the observable hazards within the current boundary of wind: air pollution, hurricanes, and wildfires. Internal meteorological process management addresses the unexpected or unobservable processes behind them, including wind direction as a driver, wind-related ecological disturbance, and location-specific wind systems that modify rather than constitute hazards. Conceptually, these are treated as a linked sequence rather than equivalent categories: meteorological drivers shape the conditions under which hazards emerge, hazards produce direct physical impacts or ecological disturbances, and those disturbances in turn modify vulnerability and subsequent risk. The method behind the paper was a structured narrative review, supported by the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram, that systematically identified, screened, and synthesized English-language literature spanning climatology, meteorology, engineering, emergency management, and public policy, with iterative thematic coding applied across three units of analysis: international organizations, developed countries, and developing countries.

The results reveal a field that performs well on the visible half of the problem. At the international level, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, backed by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, encourages all-hazard management across all sectors, while the Paris Agreement targets the climate change that drives air pollution. International non-governmental organizations have pushed early action, from the Cameroon Red Cross prioritizing emergency preparedness to Emirates Nature-WWF in the United Arab Emirates promoting rapid air quality improvement and Fire and Emergency New Zealand responding quickly to pollution events. In developed countries, the United States has built hurricane and flood capability, with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposing the failures of fragmented all-hazard planning and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 demonstrating the payoff of prior planning, incident command systems, coordination, and leadership. European nations, despite the rarity of tropical systems there, have managed the health and social consequences of extratropical cyclones such as Vince in 2005 and subtropical storm Alpha in 2020, delivering humanitarian logistics from mental to physical health services.

Developing countries tell a parallel story centered on fire. Africa has been described as a wildfire continent, with roughly 70 percent of the 400 million hectares burned worldwide each year located in African savannas and grasslands, and those fires, many too small for satellite detection, disrupt the global atmosphere, carbon cycle, and ecosystems. South American nations including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, frequently threatened by heatwave- and drought-driven wildfires and major timber exporters besides, have invested in advanced weather technology and land-use planning, while Southeast Asian countries have long battled wildfires in the Lower Mekong Basin. Yet across all three stakeholder groups, the review finds, internal meteorological processes are managed only through improvised alternatives rather than systematic frameworks, leaving the underlying drivers of wind-related risk largely unexamined.

Why bother closing that gap? The review identifies three major benefits of genuine all-hazard management. First, it provides a robust reference for all stakeholders across every phase of the emergency management cycle, from prevention and preparedness through response and recovery. Second, it enables cooperation among stakeholders who otherwise work in silos, including governments, businesses, voluntary organizations, mass media, and local communities, building professional networks that hazard-specific management rarely achieves. Third, it accumulates disaster response capacity for local communities, a process that helped create the professional emergency management profession itself in the twenty-first century. Focusing only on visible risks, the paper warns, misses crucial opportunities for early detection, forecasting, prevention, and recovery. Wildfire research makes the point concretely: air stability, wind direction, and wind speed are key factors controlling ember movement, fire intensity, and fire spread, so monitoring those meteorological processes directly improves forecasts and emergency response before dangerous conditions fully materialize.

The policy implications are deliberately framed as directions to test rather than mandates to impose. Drawing on the principle of progressiveness from the Emergency Management Institute’s 2007 principles of disaster management, the review suggests that practitioners could use fine-scale wind direction patterns, wind-driven pollinator decline, and localized indigenous wind knowledge to identify subtle signals, anticipate cascading impacts, and inform early warning indicators. Emergency managers might assess whether micro-level wind direction data supports interagency collaboration during wind-related incidents; institutions could explore incorporating pollinator-wind interactions into climate adaptation and biodiversity monitoring; and local authorities might test whether indigenous wind knowledge strengthens land-use planning and community risk education. The author is explicit that these recommendations are complementary possibilities, not conclusions requiring immediate revision of the Sendai Framework or other international instruments, and that feasibility must be evaluated within existing risk assessment, early warning, and preparedness programs while accounting for different institutional capacities and regional hazard contexts.

The review also acknowledges its own limits. It did not explore the complex interrelationships between wind hazards and other natural or anthropogenic hazards, and language and accessibility constraints, including the exclusion of non-English publications and reliance on paywalled literature, may have underrepresented regions with different approaches to wind hazard management. Still, as what the author describes as a pioneering attempt to study all-wind-hazard management comprehensively, the paper offers a conceptual framework that connects climatology, disaster risk reduction, and emergency management from a single analytical viewpoint. The next steps it proposes are practical: tabletop exercises, seminars, drills, and eventually full-scale exercises that test whether incorporating both external hazards and internal meteorological processes improves coordination under broader wind-hazard scenarios. If those tests succeed, the humble daily movement of air, the same force that carries pollen between plants and shapes local winds known only to the communities that live with them, could finally take its place alongside the hurricane in the world’s disaster plans, reducing human loss, economic damage, and the mental stress that follows in the wake of every wind-driven catastrophe.

Subject of Research: All-hazard management of wind hazards and internal meteorological processes in disaster risk reduction

Article Title: All-hazard management approach for wind

Article References: Ha, K.-M. (2026). All-hazard management approach for wind. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 157(10), Article 624. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-026-06559-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00704-026-06559-3

Keywords: wind hazards, all-hazard management, disaster risk reduction, meteorology, climatology, emergency management, Sendai Framework, wildfires, hurricanes, air pollution, pollinator decline, resilience

The scale of the problem is staggering. According to World Health Organization data cited in the review, roughly 20 percent of the population in East and South Asian countries—some 360 million people—are adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19. These regions share significant geographic, cultural, and socio-economic characteristics that make them acutely vulnerable to natural hazards, from the seismic belts running through Nepal, China, Indonesia, and Japan to the flood-prone deltas of India and Bangladesh. UNICEF has reported that children in East Asia and the Pacific face the greatest exposure to multiple climate disasters, while South Asia has the highest number of children exposed to severe water scarcity. In other words, a substantial fraction of the world’s teenagers is growing up with disaster as a recurring backdrop to ordinary development.

To map what is known about resilience in this population, the research team—Fathima Hasanath KP, Jayakumar Christy, Bangalore N. Roopesh, and Binu VS—searched major academic databases including PubMed, SCOPUS, Web of Science, and PsycINFO, supplementing peer-reviewed findings with grey literature from organizations such as Save the Children, UNICEF, and the World Bank Group. Their search window covered publications from 2010 to 2023, and they focused specifically on adolescents aged 10 to 19. The narrative review approach allowed them to synthesize evidence across disciplines—psychology, public health, disaster risk reduction, and education—rather than confining themselves to narrowly defined interventions or outcomes.

The theoretical backbone of the review draws on well-established frameworks in developmental science. Resilience, in the tradition of researchers such as Ann Masten, is understood as a multisystem phenomenon: it emerges not from a single internal strength but from the interaction of individual biology and psychology with families, schools, communities, and cultures. The authors also invoke Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development, which situates the adolescent within nested layers of influence, and Lazarus’s classic work on stress, appraisal, and coping, which emphasizes that the meaning a young person assigns to a disaster shapes its psychological impact as much as the event itself. This framing matters because it shifts the policy question from how to fix vulnerable individuals to how to build environments that allow ordinary adaptive systems to function.

The individual-level factors identified in the reviewed studies form a strikingly consistent pattern. Self-efficacy—the belief that one’s own actions matter—emerges repeatedly as a predictor of resilience, and recent work suggests that physical activity can bolster it by satisfying basic psychological needs. Coping skills and locus of control also feature prominently: a longitudinal study of adolescents after an earthquake in China found that PTSD symptom trajectories were linked to coping strategies and to whether survivors believed outcomes were within their control. Spirituality and meaning-making appear as culturally salient resources in several Asian contexts, while maladaptive trauma-related cognitions—rumination, self-blame, catastrophic thinking—predict poorer outcomes, as documented among adolescents exposed to the Lombok earthquake in Indonesia.

The social side of the ledger is equally well stocked. Family support, peer networks, and school connectedness consistently buffer disaster-exposed teens against depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Studies of Tibetan adolescent survivors five years after the 2010 Yushu earthquake identified social and relational factors associated with sustained resilience, and research on children in the 2015 South Indian floods highlighted how community members’ perceptions shaped young people’s recovery. The review also draws on the concept of social capital—the networks of trust and reciprocity that bind communities together—to explain why some neighborhoods rebound while others fracture. Place attachment and sense of place, examined in work on how schools can aid children’s resilience, suggest that rebuilding familiar physical environments is itself a psychological intervention.

Culture threads through the entire analysis. East and South Asian societies often lean collectivist, and the review suggests this orientation can be a double-edged sword: strong communal obligations and extended family systems provide dense support networks after disasters, yet the same structures can impose expectations that silence adolescents’ distress or channel it into somatic complaints. Gender emerges as a critical moderating variable. UNDRR and UNICEF reports cited by the authors document how gender inequality shapes disaster exposure and recovery, with girls in South Asia facing additional constraints on mobility, education, and access to help. Sociodemographic research on children in multi-hazard regions of India reinforces that resilience is not distributed equally across class, caste, and gender lines.

What distinguishes this review is its insistence that adolescents be treated as assets rather than casualties. The authors connect their findings to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the United Nations blueprint that promotes the concept of building back better, arguing that understanding adolescent resilience can enhance adaptation and community engagement and thereby advance the framework’s objectives. Evidence from child-centred disaster risk reduction programs, such as those documented by Plan International, shows that when young people participate in hazard mapping, preparedness drills, and school-based risk reduction curricula, they gain competence and confidence while simultaneously strengthening their communities’ collective readiness. Disaster education research from Iran and elsewhere identifies concrete components—knowledge of hazards, practical skills, and participatory pedagogy—that improve adolescent resilience measurably.

The clinical implications are equally concrete. The reviewed literature suggests that post-disaster mental health services for adolescents should screen for cumulative exposure, since repeated disasters compound psychological distress, and should target modifiable factors such as coping skills, trauma-related cognitions, and social support rather than pathology alone. Lessons drawn from the Great East Japan Earthquake informed approaches to supporting adolescent mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that disaster psychology has become a transferable body of knowledge across crisis types. The authors also flag the risks of overlooking adolescents entirely: studies of disaster recovery note associations between disaster exposure and adolescent risk behaviors, including substance use, when post-traumatic stress and depression go untreated.

Ultimately, the review’s central message is an investment case. As the authors put it, investing in adolescents by encouraging their involvement in disaster reduction is an investment in a safer, more resilient future. For a region home to 360 million young people on the front lines of an intensifying climate era, the evidence assembled here suggests that resilience is not a mystery to be admired but infrastructure to be built—through schools that teach preparedness, families and communities that stay connected, services that reach the most marginalized, and policies that give teenagers a genuine role in protecting the places they call home. The science, in short, says the youngest survivors can become the strongest first responders, if adults design the systems to let them.

Subject of Research: Psychological resilience among East and South Asian adolescents exposed to natural disasters

Article Title: Exploring Psychological Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters: A Narrative Review on East and South Asian Adolescents

Article References: KP, F. H., Christy, J., Roopesh, B. N., & VS, B. (2025). Exploring Psychological Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters: A Narrative Review on East and South Asian Adolescents. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00483-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00483-7

Keywords: psychological resilience, adolescents, natural disasters, East Asia, South Asia, mental health, disaster risk reduction, Sendai Framework, coping skills, social support, UNICEF, school-based preparedness

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