Introduction - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 15

- Encourage awareness and interest in early warning systems

in politically active or important groups within countries

- Develop two-way communication channels between issuers of warnings

and users of warnings

- Ensure hazard risk reduction and climate change adaptation are ongoing

and iterative processes

- Improve lead time of warnings, leaving suffi cient time for action, and

regularly update warnings

- Improve spatial resolution of observational networks and downscale

forecasts

- Develop sector-specifi c predictions and warnings, which are tailored to the

informational needs of different sectors, as well as sector specifi c response
plans

- Diversify warning dissemination methods, while building trust

- Develop pre-agreed triggers for action and emergency funding

- Improve long-term fi nancing of early warning systems, ensuring it is

suffi cient, sustained, coordinated, and well targeted

- Develop mechanisms that will enable households to respond to warnings and

strengthen community and household resilience (e.g., insurance mechanisms,
conditional cash transfers, support poverty reduction, public awareness/edu-
cation programs, etc.)

At the same time, governments and institutional actors, who have access to infor-
mation and warnings, often fail to respond because of an “accountability defi cit.”
Early warning system users are fragmented into different groups - farmers, fi sher-
men, pastoralists - and come from politically marginalized areas or communities
(Bailey 2013 ). Bailey ( 2013 ) explains:
Governments in at-risk countries may attach low priority to the needs of poor or marginal
communities when deciding how to allocate public funds or whether to respond to early
warnings. Rates of public spending in the politically marginalized and sparsely populated
northern drylands of Kenya are among the lowest in the country despite extreme levels of
poverty and vulnerability to drought. When crisis struck these regions in 2011, the Kenyan
government was slow to respond and mobilize assistance.

The Kenyans for Kenya initiative - a unique partnership between the Kenyan Red
Cross, local corporations such as the Safaricom Foundation and Kenya Commercial
Bank Foundation, as well as individual Kenyans - helped overcome this account-
ability defi cit. Lobbying for action and raising funds for assistance, drought was
transformed into a politically salient issue (Bailey 2013 ).