Communicating risk — the need for lucidity
One benefit of using both traditional and modern scientific knowledge is that it enables scientists to make the communication of forecasts more accessible to local communities — a problem not confined to developing countries. Communicating risk in a format that people will understand is a perennial challenge.
The UK-based nongovernmental organisation Practical Action, with support from the European Commission, has improved community flood forecasting by introducing scientific tools to existing monitoring systems in riverine villages of Nepal.
Until recently, people would receive telephone calls from relatives upstream warning them about heavy rains and possible flooding, says Yuwan Malakar, a project officer at Practical Action Nepal. “We improved on that method,” Malakar explains, by installing sirens and establishing downstream flood thresholds based on upstream river gauge stations, established by the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology.
“When we improve on what [communities] are already doing, they own it,” says Malakar. It is also easier to “build [mechanisms] into their daily lives.”
The result? When Banke district along the West Rapti River, in Nepal’s Mid-Western Region, saw the highest floods for 35 years in August 2012, there were no casualties or injuries, even though it was four years after Practical Action had left the area having established an early warning system there.
When water levels rose from three to five meters at the Kusum hydrological station, they automatically triggered a siren. Over 20,000 people in Banke district were alerted by text messaging, sirens, megaphones and radio broadcasts. They had six hours to bury their valuables and run to temporary shelters, and raised platforms that had been built in the inundation zone.
In southern Nepal’s Chitwan District, an area affected by flash floods from smaller rivers, the organisation used local communication methods to improve access to scientific warnings. Besides the conventional sirens, local messengers (katuwals) have been trained to spread information about forthcoming floods, based on rainfall levels in gauges installed by Practical Action.
“Katuwals know in which houses there are disabled persons, pregnant women, and lactating mothers,” explains Malakar. This ensures that everyone, including those most vulnerable, are protected.
Bridging divides, building trust
Trust between scientists and local communities is important, and can be developed through close engagement.
“If we incorporate indigenous practices and try to link them with scientific early warning systems, then the reliability and acceptance among local communities increases, and that’s how you can really breach this communication gap,” says Rajib Shaw, associate professor at Kyoto University’s International Environment and Disaster Management Laboratory.
Building trust is particularly urgent in the emerging context of climate change, Shaw emphasizes, as farmers cannot account for drastic and abrupt changes in weather.
“The biggest challenge is validating knowledge — scientific [knowledge] for the local communities and local [knowledge] for the scientific communities,” says Mercer, a process that can be “extremely time-consuming.”
There are, however, a growing number of people making the time to do this.
Shane Cronin, professor and director of Volcanic Risk Solutions, a research center at Massey University in New Zealand, offers an illustration from his work with communities on Ambae, an island containing an active volcano in the Pacific country of Vanuatu.
Cronin describes a misunderstanding between locals and scientists. In response to a 1995 eruption scare, French authorities sent small warships to evacuate the Ambae islanders. But the traditional warning signs — changes in the color of Lake Vui, birds migrating outwards, ants surfacing and colonizing vegetation, and other unusual animal behavior — were not apparent. The strange, and to them, unwarranted, appearance of ships only scared the local people, who left their homes and ran uphill: “Everyone was really angry about the incident afterwards,” says Cronin.
Cronin initiated a dialogue in the local Bislama language, through a series of workshops held in two communities. Participants created village histories, volcanic hazard maps, and disaster response timelines that incorporated scientific information with cultural beliefs. Among other exercises, they matched local eruption timelines to exact years based on radiocarbon dating. The interactions allowed for “people to see that scientists weren’t always going to be individuals they disagreed with, and in fact, that they could learn some things from the scientists, as well as them teaching scientists other things.”
After 90 years of silence, the Ambae volcano finally erupted in November 2005. By then, relations between communities and officials had warmed, so when hazard levels escalated to ‘red,’ communities coordinated the evacuation of a third of the island’s population for over a month. The awareness raised by the eruption has led to communities requesting the installation of a permanent monitoring station.
