Twice a day during the rainy season, Raquel Izarra climbs to the roof of her home in Santa Inés Bajo, a low-income suburb east of Lima, and measures the rainfall with a gauge she built herself. She sends the reading to the authorities on WhatsApp, one of more than 60 volunteers trying to give their community time to prepare should heavy rain trigger the flooding and mudslides that struck the area in 2017.
“Every year the rainfall situation has been getting worse,” she told Reuters. “Now, with this, we feel safer.”
Her neighbourhood’s improvised network captures the central finding of a draft United Nations report seen by Reuters: disaster warning systems have spread widely, but they still fail the people most exposed to climate risk. Equipping communities such as Izarra’s to cope will be one of the debates at the COP31 climate talks in Turkey, which run until 20 November.
The report measured progress across four pillars: risk knowledge; detection, monitoring and forecasting; warning dissemination; and preparedness and response. More than two-thirds of countries — 136 in total — now have some early warning capacity, a 143 per cent increase since reporting began in 2015. Yet only 64 of them have capability across all four pillars, and gaps remain, above all in operational readiness and financing.
The head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said the target of full coverage for everybody by 2027 was unlikely to be met.
The gaps are sharpest where incomes are lowest. Data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s World Risk Poll, cited in the report, showed that in low-income and lower-middle-income countries fewer than half of those warned were able to act on the warning, compared with three-quarters in upper-middle-income countries. Of people surveyed in 2025 who had experienced a disaster in the previous five years, 80 per cent had received at least one warning, but the share varied from 95 per cent in East Asia to 47 per cent in Central and Western Africa.
James Kinyangi, head of climate and policy at the African Development Bank, told Reuters that the extra investment required in Africa ranged between $5 billion and $10 billion. The bank is working with more than 30 countries to develop systems, he said, but more than 20 others still need financial and technical support to build infrastructure, capacity and early-warning services.
Some tools are spreading. The report said 38 countries have fully operational cell-broadcast warning systems and another 17 are in the final stages of developing them. It estimated that $500 million would be enough to extend coverage to every country and maintain it for three years.
Even the best systems have limits. A rock and ice avalanche and flood in Nepal in August left thousands of people dead, injured or missing and caused almost $3 billion in damage. Monsoon flood warning systems were in place, but the scale and speed of a torrent caused by a collapsing glacier meant many people were swept away before data could be transmitted to trigger warnings. Phone calls from people further up the valley saved some lives, including at the Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School, where headmaster Rajendra Dawadi evacuated 900 pupils.
“We had no official alerts. If we had waited for the official alert we would all be killed,” Dawadi said.
In Peru, home to the world’s largest number of tropical glacial lakes, including 528 considered at risk of overflowing, real-time monitoring is crucial, said Paola Moschella, head of glacier research at the National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems. “Information is updated minute by minute because in these types of events, if a debris flow begins, authorities need to evacuate people immediately, as the response window is only 15 to 20 minutes,” she said.
The report said more support was needed for community preparedness. In Lima, Izarra said help to cover basic costs was especially necessary in poorer areas, where even paying the monthly phone bill — vital to almost any warning system — can be difficult. “Sometimes people stop monitoring for economic reasons because they have to work to support themselves and their families,” she said.
Sources: Reuters — “Disaster warning systems race to keep pace with galloping climate risks” (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/disaster-warning-systems-race-keep-pace-with-galloping-climate-risks-2026-11-11/)
