Community Based Flood Early Warning System in Nepal: Citizen Science and Participatory Approach towards Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Building

Early Warning Systems (EWSs) are often viewed as a top-down linear model of communication flow, where the technological features, quality of data and their capacity to capture the event are given more priority than underlying human factors. However, engagement of multi-stakeholders, communication and understanding of warnings across end-users and subsequent actions based on those warnings are highly crucial for any kind of early warning systems to operate successfully. Recent focus, therefore has been more on developing people-centred early warning systems where the people in need of EWS are recognized as increasingly important actors in actively designing and operating EWS that has more local buy in and societal relevance; in a way making the process participatory and science more accessible to the general public, the concept often referred to as 'citizen science'.

In Nepal, there is a decade long practice of community based flood early warning systems, which have been demonstrating some forms of citizen science towards achieving four elements of community based EWS—risk knowledge, monitoring, communication of warnings, and response capability. This paper therefore, tries to explore how the concept of citizen science and participatory tools/methodologies are being put into practice for flood risk reduction, local disaster governance, and wider resilience building in Nepal. We will critically examine to what extent the community based flood EWS in Nepal are participatory, in way that it ensures a balance between top-down/techno-centric and bottom-up/people-centered approaches.