Early Warning Systems Defined - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 101

story as fi nding the defendants guilty for failing to predict and warn about the specifi c
timing and location of the earthquake, a task which is currently impossible.
Alexander ( 2013 , p. 9) provides a different view, stating that:
Science and scientists were not on trial. The hypothesis of culpability being tested in the
courts referred to the failure to adopt a precautionary approach in the face of clear indica-
tions of impending seismic impact, not failure to predict an earthquake, and this is amply
documented in offi cial records.
As further described in Alexander ( 2010 ), the EWS failed leading to the trial, but
not because of technical faults in the EWS. It failed because of the social process in
which those disseminating warnings and information, who later became the defen-
dants, allegedly communicated poor advice based on the hazard information avail-
able, thereby exacerbating people's vulnerability.
Parallels are seen for slower moving, creeping hazards, such as climate change.
Society's multiple EWSs have given clear technical information for climate change,
warning of the foreseeable consequences if no action is taken. The needed actions
based on these warnings about climate change are well known and well understood,
yet they are not being fully enacted. The problems encountered in dealing with the
hazard of climate change are social, not technical.
Where society chooses not to follow the warnings from an EWS, despite foresee-
able consequences, do other mechanisms exist which might spur action? The les-
sons from creeping hazards are poignant in that society often displays little interest
in addressing creeping hazards until a threshold has been crossed yielding a crisis
(Glantz 1994a , b ). In the same way that increased lead time for tornado warning in
the USA might be counterproductive for saving lives (Hoekstra et al. 2011 ), too
much lead time for climate change might be discouraging action.
Consequently, a useful notion to explore is different time scales for warnings in
order to consider medium warning systems and late warning systems. That does not
preclude EWS, but instead indicates that different time scales of warning in combi-
nation might contribute towards the social process of appropriate action. The key is
not to rely on medium warning or late warning. Otherwise, it might be impossible
to take the action needed, as with the 1998 tsunami in Papua New Guinea. Instead,
it is about embedding warning systems within society and using different mecha-
nisms, approaches, and information in parallel to support the pursuit of needed
actions.
Overall, the main challenge is to focus on an EWS as a social process, overcom-
ing the entrenched view of EWS being mainly technical with those outside a com-
munity handing 'expert' information to those in a community. In that sense, the
notion of an 'end-to-end EWS' is misleading. It reinforces a top-down operating
perspective, by implying that an expert forecaster can produce a forecast and then
hand it down (fi guratively and literally) to a community eagerly awaiting the hazard
information so that they can do exactly what they are told in response. That is, it
assumes that an EWS actually has two ends with a linear process moving from one
end to the other end.