Co-creating solutions for enhancing resilience in informal settlements
How do I strengthen early warning systems to minimise impacts?
How do I strengthen community-based flood early warning systems to minimise impacts?
Flood Early Warning Systems are critical tools to reduce loss of life and livelihoods during flood events. However, there is growing recognition of the need to ground technical warnings with more nuanced local knowledge that helps refine not only the accuracy of these warnings, but also how the location and scale of the associated risks and impacts are understood by communities. Informal settlements experience significant impacts from natural hazards like floods, which are worsened by climate change and their exposure, vulnerability, and social and political marginalisation in disaster risk management policy and practice. It is in such areas that the effective functioning of community-based flood early warning systems (CBFEWS) is most critical. Although some localised examples of CBFEWS exist, these have seldom been upscaled.
This section provides case study examples of CBFEWS in the cities of Durban and Beira, shares learnings from these experiences (with a particular focus on the integration of local and technical knowledge in these early warning systems) and provides recommendations for how CBFEWS might be developed in vulnerable areas in other cities.
Durban’s CBFEWS
This document consolidates Durban’s existing CBFEWS experience in the Palmiet Catchment and shares reflections on what this experience means for upscaling CBFEWS in other locations
Flood early warning systems in Beira
This document shares the elements of flood early warning systems that exist in vulnerable informal settlements in Beira.
Piloting CBFEWS upscaling in Durban
This document shares the approach Durban adopted to test CBFEWS upscaling in additional settlements in Durban and documents the outcomes and learnings.
Learnings and recommendations for upscaling CBFEWS
This document consolidates the CBFEWS experiences to date across Durban and Beira, and provides practical guidelines and recommendations on how to upscale CBFEWS in other areas.
CLARE is a £110m, UK-Canada framework research programme on Climate Adaptation and Resilience, aiming to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards. CLARE is an initiative jointly designed, funded and run by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. CLARE is primarily funded by UK aid from the UK government, along with the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
