Preparedness and planning for the mountain hazard and risk chain in Nepal
Lead Research Organisation:
Northumbria University
Department Name: Fac of Engineering and Environment
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.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Katie Oven (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Arrell K
(2024)
The dynamic threat from landslides following large continental earthquakes.
in PloS one
Harvey E
(2024)
Review of landslide inventories for Nepal between 2010 and 2021 reveals data gaps in global landslide hotspot
in Natural Hazards
Johnson, A.L.
(2025)
The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research
Kincey M
(2024)
National-Scale Rainfall-Triggered Landslide Susceptibility and Exposure in Nepal
in Earth's Future
Kincey M
(2022)
Modelling post-earthquake cascading hazards: Changing patterns of landslide runout following the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, Nepal
in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
Sijapati S
(2025)
Needs and uses of scientific information for earthquake and monsoon contingency planning by humanitarian clusters in Nepal
in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Van Wyk De Vries M
(2024)
Brief Communication: Weak correlation between building damage and loss of life from landslides
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 | So far, the research has 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 extensive documentation of local and Indigenous knowledges of hazards across the four case-study municipalities. An important finding is that local knowledge can encompass both practical measures that often 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 metaphysical perspectives. It is important to recognise these different understandings, as well as people's general interest in other ways of knowing (e.g., Western science), while at the same time acknowledging that there is unlikely to be a single resolution. Building on this, the project team has 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 towards 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. We have started to explore how we can more effectively share this information with communities and local government in our case study municipalities. This has included piloting the use of a participatory 3D model of a hillside settlement in one of the case study palikas to display hazard data in a more visual way, and providing a space for rural residents to explore and contest these data based on their own knowledge and experiences. - 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 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. Within this, we have developed an approach to model dynamic exposure and vulnerability, which moves beyond current static representations of people in landscapes by bringing together our ethnographic, participatory mapping and modelling work. The overall 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, and the (potential) role that physical and social science can play in supporting these planning processes. |
| 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 | Communities and Social Services/Policy Environment Government Democracy and Justice |
| URL | http://www.sajag-nepal.org |
| Description | 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 2025. 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 worked with the clusters to generate seasonal monsoon scenarios to inform the 2024 monsoon Emergency Response Preparedness Plan, and worked with the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), Government of Nepal, to anticipate potential impacts based on the seasonal forecast that was issued by SASCOF in May 2024. This latter information was incorporated into the Government's 2024 monsoon preparedness plan. In addition, the project team worked with the UN Resident Coordinator's Office to generate rolling 14-day impact estimates throughout the 2024 monsoon, except for a short period when 14-day forecast information was unavailable. These rolling impact estimates were shared by the UN Resident Coordinator's Office with the humanitarian clusters and with colleagues in the NDRRMA, and evaluated continuously against impact reports. 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. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Sector | Environment,Other |
| Impact Types | Societal Policy & public services |
| Description | Contribution to UNOCHA recovery plan for Jajarkot earthquake, Nepal |
| Geographic Reach | Local/Municipal/Regional |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or improved professional practice |
| Description | PhD studentship on disaster vulnerability |
| Amount | £111,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Northumbria University |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2021 |
| End | 09/2024 |
| Description | Towards a transdisciplinary approach for investigating high-magnitude interstate water hazards |
| Amount | £9,500 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Northumbria University |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2022 |
| End | 03/2022 |
| Description | Asian Disaster Reduction and Response Network |
| Organisation | Asian Disaster Reduction and Response Network |
| Country | Malaysia |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | ADRRN is a consortium of civil society organisations working towards disaster risk reduction in Asia. The Sajag-Nepal project has provided an example to consortium partners of how physical and social scientists, humanities scholars, civil society organisations, the UN, and government can collaborate to reduce the risk of future events. |
| Collaborator Contribution | ADRRN has provided the project with a platform to reach its network of over 60 national and international NGOs, many of which are working in areas that are similar to Nepal in being affected by earthquake and monsoon-triggered hazards. This has provided us with a platform for communicating our research findings to a wider audience beyond Nepal, including at the Regional Humanitarian Partnerships Weeks. |
| Impact | Contributed a session on multi-sectoral partnerships for DRR (2022) and participatory mapping approaches for understanding local scale hazard and exposure (2023) at the Regional Humanitarian Partnership Weeks in Bangkok. This was an interdisciplinary collaboration involving natural and social scientists, humanities scholars, and practitioners engaged in the Sajag-Nepal project. |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Community and local government workshops |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | Three workshops were held in Bhote Kosi Rural Municipality with local government and community partners with the following aims: to explain how the slope monitoring equipment works and to answer any questions; to share the findings from the monitoring work so far; and to agree a plan moving forward. The workshops were attended by around 70 people in total, with lively questions and discussion and a plan to continue the monitoring work was agreed. The workshops were filmed by project partner BBC Media Action for a second project film on landslide management, which is designed to reach a wider (national/international) audience. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Installation of the slope monitoring equipment |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | We worked with local government and community partners to identify the slopes to be monitored. We worked together to install the slope monitoring equipment and to agree a monitoring and engagement protocol. Around 40 people were involved across the eight sites, with the monitoring work aligned with local interests and concerns. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Living with landslides films 1 & 2 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Project partner, BBC Media Action, worked with the research team to produce two films based upon our ethnographic research titled 'Living with landslides in Nepal parts 1 and 2'. Part 1 was screened at our project conference in Kathmandu in September 2023 (attended by around 80 people including government, UN and NGO representatives, and physical and social scientists), the Humanitarian Partnerships Week in Bangkok in December 2023 (in a session attended by 50-60 people from the humanitarian and development sectors), at the RGS annual conference in London in August 2024 (in a session attended by 30 academics), and at the UKRI meeting on 'Scoping future research priorities for DRR in the global South (attended by academics, practitioners and funders). The aim of the films is to tell the story of rural residents living with landslides in their own words, and to highlight their own questions and concerns, with the aim of informing future disaster risk reduction policy and practice. Both films can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/@Sajag-Nepal |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023,2024,2025 |
| Description | P3DM workshop in Bhote Kosi |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | A workshop was held in Kodari in Bhote Kosi Rural Municipality with the aim of piloting the use of a participatory 3D model (P3DM) to gather and share information about landslide hazard and risk locally. Around 25 people attended the workshop. The participatory activities, involving the projection of hazard data generated by the project, which could be explored and contested, generated a great deal of interest and sparked questions and discussion. The model is now housed in the local ward office following a request by the local ward chairperson. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Perspective piece: Knowing the landscape and taming the landscape |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Perspective piece written for the Southasiadisasters.net publication on Postcolonial Futures for DRR in South Asia aimed at describing some of the research findings around local DRR practices and forms of knowledge in the project's case study communities. The piece was led by researchers at the Social Science Baha and argues that knowledge of local practices can be used to design more inclusive and diverse DRR activities. https://aidmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/211-Postcolonial-Futures-for-DRR-in-SA.pdf |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Podcast Takeover |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We have written and produced three episodes for the Disasters: Deconstructed podcast as part of Series 9 on local stories from communities living with risk around the world. Episode 1 has had more then 600 downloads, episode 2 around 400 downloads, and episode 3 more than 500 downloads. The aim of our mini series is to highlight the interdisciplinary and intercultural research that we have been undertaking within Sajag-Nepal with the aim of reducing the risk of mountain hazards, and to share our work with a wider academic and practitioner audience that is beyond our existing networks. Through this, we hope to see more engagement with our academic papers and planned policy briefs. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://disastersdecon.podbean.com/e/s9e1-season-introduction/ |
| Description | Regional Humanitarian Partnerships Week |
| 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 | We organised and delivered a workshop at the Regional Humanitarian Partnerships Week: Asia Pacific 2023 titled 'Local and scientific knowledges for multi-hazard risk reduction: Understandings & applications'. Drawing upon our research findings to date, the session set out to explore how different knowledges of mountain hazards and risks can be brought together in tangible and meaningful ways to support risk reduction efforts. The session was attended by 50-60 people from the humanitarian and development sector and sparked questions and discussion, and requests for further information. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.icvanetwork.org/events/regional-humanitarian-partnership-week-asia-pacific-2023/ |
| Description | Workshops to co-interpret the landslide monitoring data in Sindhupalchok and Dolakha Districts |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Members of the project team ran four workshops with community partners engaged in the slope monitoring work with the aim of co-interpreting the landslide monitoring data gathered during the 2024 monsoon. The monitoring work continues with the aim of informing decision-making around landslide risk management. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |