Critical knowledge gaps seriously hinder efforts for building disaster resilience at all levels, especially in disaster-prone least developed countries. Information deficiency is most serious at local levels, especially in terms of spatial information on risk, resources, and capacities of communities. To tackle this challenge, we develop a general methodological approach that integrates community-based participatory mapping processes, one that has been widely used by governments and non-government organizations in the fields of natural resources management, disaster risk reduction and rural development, with emerging collaborative digital mapping techniques. We demonstrate the value and potential of this integrated participatory and collaborative mapping approach by conducting a pilot study in the flood-prone lower Karnali river basin in Western Nepal. The process engaged a wide range of stakeholders and non-stakeholder citizens to co-produce locally relevant geographic information on resources, capacities, and flood risks of selected communities. The new digital community maps are richer in content, more accurate, and easier to update and share than those produced by conventional Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (VCAs), a variant of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), that is widely used by various government and non-government organizations. We discuss how this integrated mapping approach may provide an effective link between coordinating and implementing local disaster risk reduction and resilience building interventions to designing and informing regional development plans, as well as its limitations in terms of technological barrier, map ownership, and empowerment potential.

Informant: Nah. What can we do? Our houses are there so we cannot just leave everything and go to another place as we do not own land in other place! So even if we have to die, we will live and die in our own house; that is what we think.

Abstract. Early warning systems have the potential to save lives and improve resilience. However, barriers and challenges remain in disseminating and communicating early warning information to institutional decision-makers, community members and individuals at risk, including unequal access, insufficient understanding, and inability to act on warning information. Research was undertaken to analyse and understand the current flood early warning system in Nepal, considering available data and forecasts, information flows, early warning dissemination, and decision-making for early action. Data were collected from key informant interviews, community-level questionnaires, and a national stakeholder workshop and qualitatively analysed. The availability and utilisation of simple and complex flood forecasts in Nepal, and their integration into dissemination, and decision support tools were reviewed, considering their impact on improving early action to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities to flooding. Results suggest that as Nepal continues to advance in hydro-meteorological forecasting capabilities, efforts are simultaneously needed to ensure these forecasts are more effectively communicated and disseminated.

We introduce a case-study agnostic framework for the application of citizen science in a sustainable development context. This framework is tested against an activity in two secondary schools in western Nepal. While the purpose of this activity is to generate locally relevant knowledge on the physical processes behind natural hazards, we concentrate here on its implementation, i.e., to obtain a better understanding of the dynamic of the activity and to learn how it should be implemented. We determined the social capital of secondary schools as a gateway to the local community: they provide a unique setting to bring different stakeholders together. We find that co-designing a teaching programme is an effective means of both complementing local curricula and ensuring continued buy-in of local stakeholders (i.e., teachers). Student engagement depends on the local relevance of teaching materials, with more holistic or global concepts, such as climate change of lesser importance. Our activity focused on rainfall, including student-led data collection. These rainfall data provide a very good fit to co-located rain gauge data, with an average difference on weekly readings of 11.8%, reducing to 8.3% when averaged over all student readings. The autonomous development of student-organized science clubs suggested that our original framework underestimated students' capacity to apply knowledge elsewhere creatively. These clubs may be used to obtain participant feedback to improve and tailor future activities. Quantitative assessment of long-term sustainability remains challenging, due in part to high levels of student turnover. We suggest that integrating scientists wherever possible within a school or local community has a direct and positive result on participant retention.

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