Address wider development challenges and decentralise weather data monitoring - N M Prusty

"Achieving resilience is a progressive and long-term process. Mere resource deployment without understanding the root and underlying causes will not do. It is necessary to unpack and place these inherent challenges before vulnerable communities in a manner where they can develop, manage and own their resilience building instrument. Decentralised weather data management centres with weather-preneures at community level will allow for more accurate weather data." - N M Prusty, Center for Development and Disaster Management Support Services (CDDMASS)-A Strategy Center, Gurgaon - Haryana, India

Good knowing that a day long discussion is taking place to capture voices from ground on the 10^th anniversary of the dreaded Tsunami that devastated lives and livelihood of millions. 

• Our understanding based on years of working with vulnerable communities in the region tells us that one key aspects of building community resilience is to address their inability to gain control over the very instrument of development. I guess it is the role of the humanitarian community to help them to understand if the development that is being rolled out for them by the state is truly making them resilient or adding to their vulnerability.
• I believe that this control often comes through ownership, access to appropriate knowledge and information, ability to use knowledge and interpret information in a way that it responds to their needs and aspiration for a resilient life and living. This is a long journey. It calls for sustained efforts from the state as well as the Civil Society. More important is to see as to how to guard against vested interests who often show the garden path of hazardous development to the vulnerable community thus making them eventually more vulnerable. It is nothing but “development trafficking”.  
• Due to social compulsions and low economic strength, the poor and marginalized sections of the society often live in makeshift housing on vulnerable geographies like swampy low lands, flood plains, ocean fronts, dry land, hilly terrains. They often resort to the pressure of borrowing, seasonal migration resulting in subsistent living. Fortunately there is no longer any debate on this hypothesis. But the understanding is not leading to concrete action both from the state and the civil society. Our Policy and Programs continue to be built on templates that make it easy to spend money (burn rate as the donors say) but difficult to show outcome. We love universalizing models and approaches, show scanty respect towards contextualization and community and location specificity.
• Countries in the South Asia region have made significant progress in building technical capacity to study and analyse weather data. But these are at an aggregated macro level, location specific weather data gathering, location specific now casting, forecasting and  inundation mapping etc are currently unavailable to the communities especially to the communities in vulnerable locations. We need to be bold enough to believe that centralized macro models would not help, we need to experiment decentralized micro models. Therefore I tend to believe that the  gains of advancement of science and technology has not percolated to the base of the societal pyramid and the community resilience of the most marginalized and vulnerable segment continues to be at its lowest level. 
• Recovery and rehabilitation for this segment is often prolonged, often this process gets curtailed by recurring disasters making them increasingly vulnerable. No amount of techno legal intervention combined with higher resource allocation for asset creation have not demonstrated enhanced community resilience especially for this vulnerable segment of the society. 

A few thoughts

• Identifying issues connected with weather data, understanding the influence of weather variability on the vulnerability of the community, building models to gather such data at a decentralised level with due application of modern scientific models to gather such data at a decentralized level with due application of modern scientific technology and linking its’ analysis through scientific modelling in state of art data processing technology centres, disseminating the analysis through products like now casting and forecasting among the vulnerable communities in an easy to interpret manner by using community radio and appropriate ICT and mobile phone applications appears to be the need of the hour.
• We need to address the issue of community resilience from the perspective of hydro-meteorological disaster arising out of weather variability and poor early warning.
• The idea is to empower vulnerable community with ability to access timely hydro-meteorological warnings, understand and interpret it for use both for dealing with disaster risks as well as livelihood risks.  Gathering of localized weather data like timing and intensity of rain fall, temperature, humidity besides other weather related data will be an important component of the future action plan and for that purpose adequately dense data gathering systems will be needed
• Our preliminary analysis indicates that one AWS (Automated Weather Station) for every hundred square kilometre area would be able to provide the desirable density for accurate data gathering. Empower the community, strengthen community institutions to own and manage this data gathering systems.
• It is well understood and has been backed by research study that education makes people less vulnerable to natural disasters such as flood, landslide, storms that are expected to intensify with climate change. The study conducted by International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) Dr. Wolfgang Lutz, Director of IIASA’s World Population Program says that education is key for reducing disaster fatalities and enhancing adaptive capacity. So more investment is necessary on community awareness and knowledge building, capacity development of community institutions and linking them effectively with institutions for knowledge development and disaster management administration. My belief is that Capacity building is absolutely possible and decentralized management is not difficult. We must begin to trust inherent human capacity. Para Skilling is the answer. Resilience building is a skill and it can certainly be imparted. This is an Action Point for all of us at this point of time.
• One idea is to Create WEATHERPRENEURES (community level weatherman/woman) who will be trained on the weather data gathering, interpretation and dissemination through ICT application on smart mobile phones; it’s linkage with livelihood options (crop sowing, irrigation, location of fish clusters in the river/ocean, fertilizer and micronutrient application etc) will possibly lead to a dignified earning from a legitimate need based community service. It is envisaged that these Para Skilled persons known as Weather-preneures will be able to market the critical information pertaining to weather  to the community members as per their individual need thus becoming eligible to earn revenue out of the said technology dissemination
• These Weather-preneures will be able to receive from the decentralized weather data management centres regular weather updates thus would communicate disaster warnings to all households in the community cluster in the event of any imminent disaster and during non-disaster time pass on weather/crop/ soil/ fishcatch advisory services to the community members  at a suitable price. By virtue of the dual roles (disaster time and non-disaster time roles) of the Weatherpreneures it is expected that they will be able to earn the trust and confidence of the community. Thus the humanitarian service like dissemination of disaster warning becomes sustainable and reliable.

Above is the food for thought for the Humanitarian Community and could be among many other more powerful thoughts and ideas for Sendai.