South Asia floods expose gaps in regional climate cooperation | News | Eco-Business

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South Asia floods expose gaps in regional climate cooperation | News | Eco-Business

Early warnings

Climate change is likely to trigger more frequent and more extreme weather events, such as the August flood, said Shaikh Rokon, head of Riverine People, a Bangladesh non-profit promoting stewardship of rivers and inshore wetlands.

“But climate change should not be made into a scapegoat for explaining away preparedness gaps within and between countries”, Rokon said.

The United Nations’ 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction says countries should provide early warnings and help communities make preparations before floods hit.

Forecasts and timely messaging have brought the death toll from monsoon floods to near zero in vulnerable communities in South Asia, said Dharam Raj Uprety from the Britain-based development organisation Practical Action, which has implemented flood resilience projects in Bangladesh and Nepal.

But while monsoon floods can be predicted 10 to 12 days ahead, flash floods caused by rain give much less warning and that means alerting communities is a much bigger challenge, said Sardar Uday Raihan, executive engineer at the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh and India set up a joint river commission in 1972 to foster cooperation on flood warnings for the 54 rivers that cross their border. India and Nepal have a similar commission.

But it would help if there were real time data sharing on water released from dams and upstream water levels, Raihan said.

Regional cooperation

Joint action is a rarity, said Sumit Vij, a professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. It makes little sense for each country to have its own strategy to adapt to the same floods, he said.

“Though we often stress on locally led adaptation, we actually need countries and areas over the same river basin or climatic region to align their adaptation efforts and share resources to deal with disasters,” Vij said.

One rare example of cooperation has been over the Koshi and Karnali rivers that flow from Nepal to India.

The project, implemented by Practical Action and other organisations, upgraded weather stations and set up a system to send mobile telephone alerts of rising waters.

While it was carried out mainly on the Nepalese side of the border, the project also benefited Indians living near the frontier who could also receive the flood warnings.

At present, Bangladesh and India have agreements on only a few of the rivers that pass between them. The two countries should formulate a single comprehensive agreement on all their 54 transboundary rivers instead of pursuing lengthy negotiations for each river separately, Vij said.

“We, South Asian nations, need to work together,” he said.

This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/.

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