Preparedness and planning for the mountain hazard and risk chain in Nepal
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Geography - SoGE
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Planned Impact
Our research stems directly from knowledge gaps articulated by our partners in Nepal, including residents, local and central government, the UN, and humanitarian and development practitioners. The research is intended to benefit five specific groups:
1) Our primary goal is to positively impact residents living with systemic risk. We seek to better understand the socio-political and economic processes that affect everyday lives and through which systemic risk is produced and in which multi-hazards are experienced, using a co-produced and interdisciplinary approach. Our work will impact those tasked with managing risk to focus on the everyday needs of residents and ensure that efforts to reduce risk are placed within the appropriate physical and socio-political contexts. Where resources or capacity are lacking, we will work to enable local government to support residents to collectively manage their own risk by building on their own knowledge and providing new knowledge to support planning, forecasting, and messaging. We will also provide innovative means of messaging, using locally produced radio dramatisations, to exploit our new interdisciplinary science to improve decision-making, working with local people and local government to make this as effective as possible.
2) The UN Resident Coordinator's Office (RCO) and Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) are tasked with planning preparedness and response to major disasters, but this planning has had a limited scientific basis and concentrates on narrowly-defined impacts of earthquakes and flooding. There remains no consideration of dynamic multi-hazard scenarios and the risks they generate. Our project will benefit the RCO and HCT by grounding their plans in interdisciplinary science and by building greater awareness of the socio-political and physical context in which their planning sits, allowing cross-sectoral decisions that consider the impacts associated with multi-hazard events and evaluate the multi-temporal variation in risk caused by changing population exposure and vulnerability. The development of novel protocols to prepare for and respond to multi-hazard disasters will enable the RCO and HCT to make better, more effective use of local knowledge and interdisciplinary science.
3) Our previous work in Nepal has identified capacity gaps in government agencies at national, provincial and, most importantly, municipal levels. These gaps reflect a lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of the hazard chain and a lack of viable options for managing the consequent risk. Our project will benefit government risk management by significantly increasing capacity through developing and embedding a system for monitoring multi-hazard risk, and by situating this understanding within a broader socio-political context. We will engage with municipal government through existing networks and capacity-building programmes. This proposal is highly timely, coinciding with Nepal's transition to a new federal structure, allowing the research team to feed directly into new governance structures as they form.
4) Through the Community-Based Disaster Risk Management Platform, our work will have direct impact on the NGOs that implement disaster risk reduction projects. We will co-produce guidance on the use of local and scientific knowledge for reducing risk from the mountain hazard chain, as well as ethical and practical guidance for researchers on working with practitioners in Nepal.
5) The ethos of our project is based around developing the next generation of hazard and risk specialists in Nepal. We will support 15 early-career researchers, with 9 employed in Nepal. We will convene workshops specifically around skills and professional development for these researchers, and will also invite early-career professionals from our government, NGO, and UN project partners to provide the foundations for the future leaders of this sphere of work in Nepal.
1) Our primary goal is to positively impact residents living with systemic risk. We seek to better understand the socio-political and economic processes that affect everyday lives and through which systemic risk is produced and in which multi-hazards are experienced, using a co-produced and interdisciplinary approach. Our work will impact those tasked with managing risk to focus on the everyday needs of residents and ensure that efforts to reduce risk are placed within the appropriate physical and socio-political contexts. Where resources or capacity are lacking, we will work to enable local government to support residents to collectively manage their own risk by building on their own knowledge and providing new knowledge to support planning, forecasting, and messaging. We will also provide innovative means of messaging, using locally produced radio dramatisations, to exploit our new interdisciplinary science to improve decision-making, working with local people and local government to make this as effective as possible.
2) The UN Resident Coordinator's Office (RCO) and Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) are tasked with planning preparedness and response to major disasters, but this planning has had a limited scientific basis and concentrates on narrowly-defined impacts of earthquakes and flooding. There remains no consideration of dynamic multi-hazard scenarios and the risks they generate. Our project will benefit the RCO and HCT by grounding their plans in interdisciplinary science and by building greater awareness of the socio-political and physical context in which their planning sits, allowing cross-sectoral decisions that consider the impacts associated with multi-hazard events and evaluate the multi-temporal variation in risk caused by changing population exposure and vulnerability. The development of novel protocols to prepare for and respond to multi-hazard disasters will enable the RCO and HCT to make better, more effective use of local knowledge and interdisciplinary science.
3) Our previous work in Nepal has identified capacity gaps in government agencies at national, provincial and, most importantly, municipal levels. These gaps reflect a lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of the hazard chain and a lack of viable options for managing the consequent risk. Our project will benefit government risk management by significantly increasing capacity through developing and embedding a system for monitoring multi-hazard risk, and by situating this understanding within a broader socio-political context. We will engage with municipal government through existing networks and capacity-building programmes. This proposal is highly timely, coinciding with Nepal's transition to a new federal structure, allowing the research team to feed directly into new governance structures as they form.
4) Through the Community-Based Disaster Risk Management Platform, our work will have direct impact on the NGOs that implement disaster risk reduction projects. We will co-produce guidance on the use of local and scientific knowledge for reducing risk from the mountain hazard chain, as well as ethical and practical guidance for researchers on working with practitioners in Nepal.
5) The ethos of our project is based around developing the next generation of hazard and risk specialists in Nepal. We will support 15 early-career researchers, with 9 employed in Nepal. We will convene workshops specifically around skills and professional development for these researchers, and will also invite early-career professionals from our government, NGO, and UN project partners to provide the foundations for the future leaders of this sphere of work in Nepal.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Simon Dadson (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Van Wyk De Vries M
(2024)
Detection of slow-moving landslides through automated monitoring of surface deformation using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery
in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
| Description | The research has so far resulted in the following key research findings or outcomes, all of which are directly beneficial to economic development or welfare in Nepal: - New ways of understanding geohazards in Nepal from the perspective of people who are exposed to them, and who live with them on a day-to-day basis. This includes comparison of small-scale 'micro-adaptations' that people have developed to deal with hazards in the annual monsoon, and extensive documentation of local knowledge of hazards across the four case-study municipalities. An important finding is that 'local knowledge' can encompass both practical measures that align with scientific views of hazard - such as the importance of maintaining water channels and drains to decrease the risk from landslides - as well as more cosmological views of hazard. The project team has also pioneered the installation and maintenance of hillslope deformation monitoring stations at ten sites across those four municipalities, in sites chosen by the residents themselves, and worked with those residents to understand and use the resulting data (this is still in progress). Together, these new ways of understanding geohazards are key to ensuring that external disaster risk reduction activities can be made more effective, and do not inadvertently increase risk. - Initial steps toward the production of an inventory of landslides and debris flows for the whole of Nepal, and that can be updated year-by-year as new events occur. This will be of direct benefit in going beyond the nascent national-scale (but static) landslide inventory developed by the Department of Mines and Geology, and providing the first overview of how the pattern of those hazards changes year-on-year. - Development of a risk modelling framework that can account for hazards that are triggered by both monsoon rainfall and large, infrequent earthquakes. This has been produced together with the humanitarian clusters that together make up the Humanitarian Country Team and are responsible for both seasonal monsoon and earthquake contingency planning as well as shorter-term responses during the monsoon. The framework provides a knowledge base to underpin the seasonal contingency plans, and potentially a longer warning period (up to two weeks) within the monsoon to prepare for anticipatory humanitarian actions. - New ways of categorising monsoon forecasts in terms of historical rainfall patterns, as a way of enabling more robust planning to take place with the forecast information provided by the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology. - New understanding of the ways in which the Humanitarian Country Team and the Government of Nepal prepares for disasters in advance, to enable a stronger scientific evidence base to be developed that can underpin those plans. |
| Exploitation Route | The outcomes are already being used by the UN Resident Coordinator's Office and Humanitarian Country Team to support earthquake and monsoon contingency planning at a national scale. It is possible that the research outcomes may also be taken up in support of similar planning by the Government of Nepal (through the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority and the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology), and by other humanitarian organisations in the country. There is interest, for example, in developing monsoon contingency plans at provincial level, but there is a gap in knowledge about what information to use for that planning that could be filled by the project outcomes. It is also possible that the research outcomes may be relevant for other countries that are exposed to earthquake- and monsoon-related hazards, and we are working with the Resident Coordinator's Office to identify these opportunities. |
| Sectors | Agriculture Food and Drink Environment Government Democracy and Justice |
| Description | 1. Societal and economic impacts of the award: The research findings, specifically around analysis of rainfall forecasts and impact modelling of earthquake- and monsoon-triggered multi-hazards, are being used by the UN Resident Coordinator's Office and Humanitarian Country Team to underpin and improve the national-scale Emergency Response Preparedness Plans. These are contingency plans for both earthquake- and monsoon-related impacts that are regularly reviewed and updated by the clusters that make up the Humanitarian Country Team. Project research is already used to underpin the earthquake plan, and we are working with the Humanitarian Country Team to refine the research findings so that an updated ensemble of future earthquake scenarios, including the full earthquake-triggered multi-hazard chain, is available for the next iteration of the earthquake plan later in 2024. For the monsoon plan, the project team has worked with the clusters to specify their information needs and time scales, and to co-design research outputs in the form of monsoon scenario ensembles at two distinct time scales: one that uses the seasonal monsoon outlook issued in April each year, and another that uses 14-day ('sub-seasonal') rainfall forecasts available from the S2S programme. For the 2024 monsoon, the project team is working with the clusters to generate seasonal monsoon scenarios that will inform the 2024 monsoon Emergency Response Preparedness Plan, and working with the UN Resident Coordinator's Office to generate 14-day impact estimates to support the next phase of anticipatory action funding in Nepal. The same seasonal monsoon scenarios were used to advise the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), Government of Nepal, in May 2023 on the areas of Nepal that were most likely to experience impacts from the 2023 monsoon. Similar advice will be provided to the NDRRMA in advance of the 2024 monsoon. Finally, a damaging earthquake occurred in western Nepal in November 2023. The impact model was used to generate an initial estimate of the municipalities that were likely to have been hardest-hit, along with estimates of the number of completely damaged buildings. This information was provided at the request of the UN Resident Coordinator's Office, and was provided to the humanitarian clusters during the initial stages of the response. Subsequently, the project team was asked to feed into the post-earthquake recovery plan that was prepared by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in order to increase the chances that the earthquake-affected areas could build back better. Project staff drew upon learning from the project and from the aftermath of the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, and ensured that this learning was incorporated into the draft recovery plan - for example, recommending that structural surveys of public buildings in the earthquake-affected areas also account for building location and exposure to post-earthquake landsliding, and that budget be included to relocate the buildings that are most exposed to landslide hazard. 2. The research primarily addresses the following SDGs: 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), through the co-creation of knowledge around the monsoon-triggered hazard chain and the development of knowledge to underpin earthquake and monsoon contingency planning; and 13 (Climate Action), through new understanding of monsoon-related hazards across Nepal and how they are changing with time. 3. Impacts related to gender: Within the project team we have proactively sought to achieve a more balanced gender and caste/ethnic profile across the project team by prioritising recruitment of female candidates, and candidates from low-caste and Janajati groups. Of 20 research positions that have been filled within the project, 40% have gone to women and a further 10% to members of Janajati groups. All researchers employed on the project have been encouraged to shape and lead the project and its outputs, and to work closely with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers across the partner organisations. We have also supported all project researchers through the provision of a mentor to support career development, and mentor-mentee pairings are regularly refreshed and updated. All project members have been involved in developing the project's ethical framework, which explicitly includes proactive policies to tackle inequalities of all forms. Gender equality lies at the heart of the earthquake and monsoon Emergency Response Preparedness Plans that are overseen by the UN RCO, and which form the focus of some of the project work. The plans explicitly promote gender equality and social inclusion in humanitarian response, noting that although the Nepali constitution supports gender equality, existing social norms and practices can exacerbate the impacts of a disaster on women. At the same time, our own research (Oven et al. 2019) has highlighted the added burden that proactive gender inclusion in the context of disaster risk reduction can place on women and minority groups. As a result, we have sought to develop a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability in line with the SDGs and the 'leave no one behind' agenda, addressing deeper social and political constraints to equitable resilience with a specific focus on gender, caste and ethnicity. In WP1 we have explored how prevailing axes of social difference are shaping how the mountain hazard chain is experienced. Throughout this work we have been mindful of participation (which will be disaggregated by gender, caste, and ethnicity) to ensure that we have captured a range of perspectives. We have also been aware of entrenched power relations within households and communities based on gender, caste and ethnicity when organising and conducting interviews and focus group discussions. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal Economic Policy & public services |
| Description | After-dinner talk, Somerset Club, Boston, USA |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Supporters |
| Results and Impact | After-dinner speech to philanthropic donors |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Kathmandu Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Approx 80 people attended a workshop in Kathmandu to showcase findings from the project and to engage NGO staff, government and other end users |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |