Practical Action: Building flood risk resilience in Nepal

Frequent, extreme flooding of rivers has a devastating impact on many communities in Nepal, leading to significant loss of property and even of lives. Although improvements in the country’s early warning systems have reduced fatalities by providing vital localised warnings and information, some rivers remain unmonitored. Poor Nepalese farmers are particularly vulnerable to flood-related crop damage and loss of assets are growing due to heavy, unseasonal rainfall intensified by climate change.

Efforts to monitor Nepal’s river levels are hindered by the fact that data from the Government of Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology only covers the major river basins (not tributaries or unmapped mid-hill rivers) and by the high costs of river-level monitoring. Also, a lack of locally specific early warning information, restricted access to rivers for local monitoring and slow methods of communicating warnings all shrink the critical time window available for communities to take mitigating action.

Insurance could improve Nepalis’ financial resilience to flooding, but the data currently available is insufficient for developing locally specific insurance models. Better monitoring, that includes medium-sized and smaller rivers, is needed.

In this project supported by the Swiss Re Foundation, Practical Action will focus on developing a climate risk transfer mechanism – specifically, index-based flood insurance – for smallholder farmers and marginalised communities in Nepal. In doing so, it will build on its recent successful pilot of an index-based flood insurance scheme for rice paddy farmers in Nepal’s Bardiya and Kailali Districts. The project will also increase access to timely, user-friendly and locally relevant early warning systems for flooding, saving livelihoods and lives.

Specifically, the project will:

• Use new LiDAR-based technology and remote weather stations (which are highly accurate and significantly cheaper than current monitoring stations) to monitor currently unmonitored rivers as a basis for flood early warnings
• Develop and introduce a new index-based flood insurance product for rice paddy farmers in three municipalities (Gularia, Barbardia and Tikapur) by collecting data from tributaries of the Karnali River
• Explore the possibility of extending the product to cover other crop types and additional hazards such as droughts, cold spells and heatwaves
   

Targeting the most flood-prone communities in the three municipalities, the project is expected to benefit approximately 30% of the municipalities’ combined population. More than 210 000 people will benefit through improved risk reduction, strengthened resilience, and the development of a new flood insurance product

The copyright for all images displayed lies with Practical Action.

Practical Action Impact Performance Report 60 decibels