Post by GreenAnt

“Early warnings are the low-hanging fruit of climate adaptation. They are not a luxury but a must.” That's not GreenAnt talking. That's WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. 🌍 The science and the economics of early warning systems have never been clearer. Just 24 hours' notice of an impending hazardous event can cut the ensuing damage by 30 percent. Early warning systems provide more than a tenfold return on investment. And yet the gap between what the technology makes possible and what the most vulnerable communities actually have access to remains wide. The countries that have contributed the least to creating the climate crisis are bearing the heaviest disaster losses…and they are also the countries with the weakest early warning systems. That observation comes from Mami Mizutori, the UN's Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, and it frames a moral problem as clearly as it frames a technical one. The UN's Early Warnings for All initiative has set a target of universal coverage by 2027. That ambition carries a price tag: initial targeted investments of $3.1 billion between 2023 and 2027 -- roughly 50 cents per person to be covered. That is not a large number relative to what it prevents. An investment of $800 million in early warning systems in developing countries would prevent $3-16 billion in annual losses. The investment case is not the hard part. The hard part is building systems precise enough to actually deliver on it -- systems that trigger protective action reflect the physical reality of the specific place it's meant to protect, not a regional average that may never fire when and where it needs to. That is the problem GreenAnt's Desidera platform is built to solve. 📡 🔗 Read more about the Early Warnings for All initiative: https://lnkd.in/emK4iYhU #EarlyWarning #ClimateResilience #DisasterRiskReduction #AnticipatoryAction #EW4All #FloodRisk #HumanitarianFinance #GreenAnt