Disaster management – Artifex.News

Nepal’s flash foods: How can communities rebuild after a disaster?

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:43:00 +0000

On August 26, floods hit Nepal’s Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts, wiping away entire towns and communities. Roads and bridges were washed away, and telecommunications networks were down. The immediate focus was on rescuing people trapped under debris and providing relief to those affected. A month on, the focus has now shifted to rehabilitation, rebuilding and long-term recovery.

The Hindu spoke to Dr. Nimesh Dhungana, Senior Lecturer in Disaster Studies and Global Health at the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), who studies disasters through the lens of governance, democracy and accountability, about recovery after the devastating flash floods. Dr. Dhungana describes himself as an accidental disaster researcher who started studying disasters after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. He also studied the Himalayan country’s response to the COVID pandemic. Edited excerpts:

Is there a difference between the way the government responded to the 2015 earthquake, the COVID pandemic and the recent flash floods?

The government has a sense of moral responsibility [to save lives] when a disaster of this scale strikes. One common element is that the state acts decisively and with the speed required in the aftermath of such disasters. It mobilises its emergency forces, led by the security forces. However, we are increasingly seeing that the state’s response is not matched by a sustained commitment to long-term recovery and reconstruction. That responsibility starts to fade, particularly when it comes to listening to affected communities and ensuring that their rights are protected during the long-term recovery and reconstruction process. It is about transparency, engagement with the affected population and ensuring that they have a say in the recovery and reconstruction process.

Your work suggests that disasters expose government failures that have built up, or existed long before the disaster itself. What do you mean by this?

I think there is a long-standing debate about what constitutes a disaster. The recent floods have also forced us to revisit this basic question: what is a disaster in the first place? One way of thinking about it is as an event that is often unpredictable and attracts considerable attention from national and international media, as the recent floods did.

Another way of thinking about a disaster is as a process. It is something that happens because of long-term vulnerabilities. Disasters are not caused by nature alone. It is a mixture of the two. I think there is a growing consensus that a disaster is more of a process than just an event. Unfortunately, it is more comfortable to think of a disaster as an event, something beyond our control. We saw that with the 2015 earthquake and the pandemic. This is not limited to Nepal; it is a wider issue. I think this is a problematic way of looking at disasters. It can absolve state actors of accountability. We need deeper introspection into the choices we make, our governance structures and institutions. We should adopt a more rights-based approach to disaster response and rethink how we address longstanding inequalities and injustices.

The state is often quick to respond to disasters, but its approach is usually centralised and top-down. This undermines the roles and responsibilities of local bodies, which are the frontline responders.

How do you balance the role of the local bodies and the federal government, especially when a massive disaster strikes a region, leaving the local communities wiped out?

It depends on the scale of the disaster. The flash floods in Nepal are unprecedented. Given the scale of the disaster, Nepal needs support from outside, not just nationally, but also internationally. However, this is no excuse for not involving local representatives in the process. Ward officials, elected representatives, local NGOs and community-based organisations, which are often at the forefront of disaster response, have greater knowledge of the local context. In the Rasuwa floods, questions have been raised about their role being undermined by the centralised, top-down disaster response.

Mobilising military and security forces for disaster relief is a way of centralisation. We need to think beyond security forces for the immediate response and recovery. We need to engage more civilian actors for immediate relief and in policy-making. We should empower the local government with resources, equipment and infrastructure to deal with disasters. In the longer term, policy-wise, local bodies need to have a say in answering the big questions, like how we resettle communities.

The problem is that, in Nepal and elsewhere, reconstruction tends to focus more on physical reconstruction, like building houses and other infrastructure. But they are often not aligned with community priorities. It also raises a deeper question: what does recovery mean? Is it just rebuilding houses, or is it a societal recovery? What if people don’t want to move from a certain place? How do we listen to their claims and choices? The local government can play a really important role here.

Your work says there is a difference between the community ‘having a voice’ and ‘having teeth’. What does that mean?

This also stems from a more rights-based approach to thinking about development and disasters. There’s a long-standing literature on the role of voice in this kind of difficult situation, going back to Amartya Sen’s work in famine prevention. He did seminal work on how we should think about famine not just as a problem of food production, but also in terms of entitlement failures and whether communities have the right to demand answers from authorities.

Be it the 2015 earthquake or the recent Rasuwa floods, bereaved families have demanded answers from the State about the way rescue and relief operations have been organised. There have also been questions about fairness and transparency in relief distribution. This is also about democracy and the responsiveness of State institutions, and whether they listen to these demands. ‘Teeth’ also means having the resources and ability to respond through concrete policy and programmatic interventions.

The idea of ‘voice’ and ‘teeth’, comes from scholar Jonathan Fox’s work. I have drawn on that idea, but also looked at it in the context of disaster. Jonathan Fox talks about how ‘voice’ and ‘teeth’ come together to operate as a ‘bite’. The ‘bite’, in this sense, is concrete measures that would protect the rights and welfare of disaster-affected communities.

What should a genuinely good, decentralised, community-led approach to disaster governance look like?

At the ward level, disaster management governance committees exist, but only on paper. We need human and financial resources to respond, as well as physical resources such as ambulances, hospitals and relief shelters. Emergency operations are not just about having resources; it is also about the general logic of governance. Disasters are better managed locally, as local governments have knowledge of the local context.

How do we ensure that human decisions do not make disasters even worse?

This comes back to who has the power to make decisions. The major casualties of the recent Nepal floods were hydropower and the road networks. Some estimates say that almost 10% of Nepal’s hydropower infrastructure was wiped out. Who granted licenses to construct hydropower projects in these areas? This is fundamentally a question of governance. Decisions about building critical infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, on riverbanks are linked to human choices.

Do communities that are victims of infrastructural breakdowns have any say? What role did they have in the making of these infrastructures?

It is important to have a conversation about the climate crisis, but we also need to examine what happened downstream. What was the government’s role before the disaster? Did it do enough to protect the public? That is where a rights-based, more governance-centric approach to disasters comes in. It also involves a more social scientific approach to understanding disasters, rather than looking at them solely from the perspective of hazards and physical sciences.

How do we plan in such a way as to either avoid a disaster or rebuild after one?

There is no single cause of disaster. Some scholars have long called disasters as a wicked problem because they result from a combination of factors, such as natural hazards, risks and vulnerabilities. In the context of climate change, the recent floods in Nepal have made it painfully clear that this issue will become even more important. We need to be thinking about disasters from a multidimensional, interdisciplinary perspective. We have seen many disasters along the Nepal-India border that defy national boundaries.

We also need to take a transboundary approach.

How do we bring this conversation into policymaking? How do we decentralise disaster governance in a way that gives more power and resources to local bodies? We need accountability and responsibility. The government must listen to communities affected by disasters. Accountability and transparency matter.

Published – September 29, 2026 07:30 am IST

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Fighting every wildfire makes bigger fires more extreme, study says

admin — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 10:51:18 +0000

A soldier works to contain wildfires in Nogales, in the High Mountains area of Veracruz state, Mexico, Monday, March 25, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.

Fires are a natural part of many landscapes globally. When forests aren’t allowed to burn, they become more dense, and dead branches, leaves and other biomass accumulate, leaving more fuel for the next fire. This buildup leads to more extreme fires that are even harder to put out. That’s why land managers set controlled burns and thin forests to clear out the undergrowth.

However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.

Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change.

What happened to all the low-intensity fires?

Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.

The 2% of fires that escape suppression are those that are more extreme and much harder to fight. They account for about 98% of the burned area in a typical year.

In other words, trying to put out all wildfires doesn’t reduce the total amount of fire equally – instead, it limits low-intensity fires while extreme fires still burn. This effect is worsened by climate change.

Too much suppression makes fires more severe

In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.

Fuel accumulation and global warming both inherently make fires more severe. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.

The suppression bias also changes the way plants and animals interact with fire.

By removing low-intensity fires, humans may be changing the course of evolution. Without exposure to low-intensity fires, species can lose traits crucial for surviving and recovering from such events.

After extreme fires, landscapes have fewer seed sources and less shade. New seedlings have a harder time becoming established, and for those that do, the hotter and drier conditions reduce their chance of survival.

In contrast, low-intensity fires free up space and resources for new growth, while still retaining living trees and other biological legacies that support seedlings in their vulnerable initial years.

By quickly putting out low-intensity fires and allowing only extreme fires to burn, conventional suppression reduces the opportunities for climate-adapted plants to establish and help ecosystems adjust to changes like global warming.

Suppression makes burned area increase faster

As the climate becomes hotter and drier, more area is burning in wildfires. If suppression removes fire, it should help slow this increase, right?

In fact, we found it does just the opposite.

We found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts. The amount of area burned doubled every 14 years with conventional fire suppression under simulated climate change, instead of every 44 years when low- and moderate-intensity fires were allowed to burn. That raises concerns for how quickly people and ecosystems will have to adapt to extreme fires in the future.

The fact that the amount of area burned is increasing is undoubtedly driven by climate change. But our study shows that the rate of this increase may also be a result of conventional fire management.

The near total suppression of fires over the last century means that even a little additional fire in a more fire-prone future can create big changes. As climate change continues to fuel more fires, the relative increase in area burned will be much bigger.

This puts more stress on communities as they adapt to increased extreme wildfires, from dealing with more wildfire smoke to even changing where people can live.

A way forward

To address the wildfire crisis, fire managers can be less aggressive in suppressing low- and moderate-intensity fires when it is safe to do so. They can also increase the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning to clear away brush and other fuel for fires.

These low-intensity fires will not only reduce the risk of future extreme fires, but they also will create conditions that favor the establishment of species better suited to the changing climate, thereby helping ecosystems adapt to global warming.

Coexisting with wildfire requires developing technologies and approaches that enable the safe management of wildfires under moderate burning conditions. Our study shows that this may be just as necessary as other interventions, such as reducing the number of fires unintentionally started by human activities and mitigating climate change.

Mark Kreider, Ph.D. Candidate in Forest and Conservation Science, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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India set to transition to hyperlocal extreme weather forecasting

admin — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Weather forecasting plays a pivotal role in the country’s functioning. Accurately predicting rain, cyclones, heatwaves and drought are critical to inform decision making on disaster management. In India the Indian Meteorology Department (IMD) is the principal government agency in all matters relating to meteorology and it specialises in the incredibly complex science of predicting weather patterns by observing, modelling and interpreting a multitude of variables.

However, in tropical countries like India, weather variability is inherently higher. IMD’s forecasts have improved vastly in the last few years as it has upgraded to technologies similar to the ones used by the U.S., the U.K. and Japan, which are known to produce accurate forecasts. Yet, there are still many days and geographies for which Indian forecasts go wrong, especially during winter and summer monsoon.

One of the major hurdles is the lack of weather monitoring ground stations. Currently, IMD operates around 800 automatic weather stations (AWS), 1,500 automatic rain gauges (ARG) and 37 doppler weather radars (DWR). This is against the total requirements of more than 3,00,000 ground stations (AWS/ARG) and around 70 DWRs. It’s interesting to note that several Indian State governments and private companies operate a significant network of ground stations (more than 20,000), many of which are not currently used by IMD. The factors range from the inaccessibility of the data to their reliability.

Currently, most of the prediction software used in forecasting are based on the global forecasting system and weather research and forecasting models, both of which are not the most modern. In contrast, with the government’s focus on Make in India, its support to start-ups and the huge public and private investments in the sectors of agriculture and climate, many new age companies are switching to artificial intelligence/machine (AI/ML) learning for more predictions. At the same time though, these technologies are only as good and verifiable as the data they can access. Thus there is an urgent need for an integrated system to fill these data gaps. New ground stations will have to be installed and the available data have to be shared seamlessly.

A promising step forward was that recently, the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare and the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare have initiated the weather information network and data system (WINDS) to generate long-term, hyper-local weather data. The system will also promote the data for wider applications in agriculture and other sectors, it will help in creating a national-level data base, and it will assist in establishing the protocols required to access the country-wide data by the various public and private concerns. Under this programme, more than 200,000 ground stations (AWS and ARG) will be installed, which can help tremendously in enhancing weather data utilisation and thus in improving weather predictions and decision making.

Meanwhile, air pollution continues to be a challenge. In the last month large dense fog blanketed the NCR region, leading to near-zero visibility. This happens mainly because of the high particulate matter and smog in the atmosphere. Fog can trap the pollutants close to the ground, leading to an increase in respiratory and other health-related issues. Another cause for worry is that in foggy conditions, some pollutants like nitrogen oxides can react with other compounds to form secondary pollutants, thus posing severe health risks, particularly to children and the elderly.

Air quality monitoring systems are currently very expensive and tend to be imported. Thanks to the Make in India initiatives, however, many Indian companies have started to manufacture low-cost and highly reliable sensor-based air quality monitoring systems. These are also easy to install and have low maintenance costs. Thus, it is now possible to install a large number of such instruments quickly, especially in the urban areas. The IITs are helping as well as they have started centres of excellence in this domain, with a mission to establish a nation-wide network of affordable air quality sensors. An integrated AI/ML-based model with data from the new air quality and weather sensors will be a major step forward to accurately predict fog as it will help in timely decision making around transportation and the health-related impacts of air pollution.

With the recent advances India is therefore poised towards establishing a world class, robust air quality and weather information network. What will bring everything together is a time-bound, inclusive approach by the various stakeholders to create this most important of national infrastructures. Once seamless data sharing and systems integration is achieved, India will have access to a new information gateway and one that is critical to addressing our climate and environmental challenges.

(Sachchida Nand Tripathi is Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Kanpur, and Ashish Agarwal is Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Ingen Technologies)

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