The natural tragedy that has devastated the Valencian Community has led the rest of European countries to do self-analysis on the functioning of your systems early warning. The latest report of the European Environment Agency (EEA) on the extreme floods that hit Germany and Belgium in 2021, which killed more than 200 people and caused €44 billion in damage, found a systemic failure of early warning systems.
«The cause of this failure was the fragmentation of the institutional responsibilities and the limitations on data sharing», said Julie Berckmans, expert in European climate risk assessment at the EEA.
But the lack of awareness and preparation of citizens also plays a role. In countries like United States and Japan, Those who have more experience with extreme weather events tend to have a risk management procedure in place.
National climate risk assessments are increasingly used to inform policy across Europe, but according to the EEA, “society’s preparedness is still low.” “The pace of climate change is so fast that policies cannot keep up,” Berckmans said. And he made clear that establishing effective early warning systems is key to preparing Europe for its dangerous future.
Berckmans has explained that in extreme weather situations, such as floods, people need timely information, but they also need understand what a warning really means. Weather agencies and local governments “need to work together on how to understand the data coming in, rather than simply provide and receive them».
Risk communication
“Even if alerts reach citizens in time, people need to understand the risk,” said Bapon Fakhruddin, who created the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System after the 2004 tsunami.
«As human beings we always calculate the risk… yesIf I don’t find a fear inside me, I won’t listen to you. Or if I don’t trust you, I will go to another source of information,” he said, explaining that only when both things coincide does a person feel a true sense of alarm.
He believes this is often overlooked in the design of early warning systems. During the 2021 floods in Germany, the 85% of those who were warned did not expect flooding very serious and 46% indicated a lack of situational awareness on protective behavior. “If people have no recent memory of a disaster, they often think they are safe,” Fakhruddin explained.
In Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, where four people died in severe flooding in June, the biggest challenge was reaching people “in a heterogeneous and highly individualized society with different lifestyle habits (only radio listeners, smartphone users, etc.) with warning messages and recommendations for action,” a spokesperson for the state Ministry of the Interior, Digitalization and Local Government told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email. electronic.
According to Fakhruddin, the design of early warning systems should be based on needs and not “from top to bottom”.
However, most high-income countries do not go out to the community to assess their needs, but instead work on the assumption that people are educated and understand any information they are given. “We just assume that people will know how to take appropriate action and we don’t address diversity within a community.”
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