In a powerful keynote address, Dr. Irasema Alcántara-Ayala argues that effective early warning systems must be grounded in early understanding of risk, vulnerability, and community realities — a vision central to the PEOPLE Project.
The WMO/WWRP Weather and Society Conference 2026 opened with an urgent and thought-provoking keynote address by Dr. Irasema Alcántara-Ayala, Co-chair of the PEOPLE Project and one of the world’s leading voices on disaster risk and social vulnerability. Dr Alcántara-Ayala’s talk — titled Early Warning Needs Early Understanding — set the intellectual and ethical tone for the entire conference, challenging the global disaster risk community to move beyond technical excellence and toward a deeper, more human-centred vision of risk reduction.
“Early warning only saves lives when it is grounded in early understanding. Data alone is not enough. Technology alone is not enough.”
Dr. Alcántara-Ayala opened by making clear that the problem facing early warnings today is not primarily technological. Despite remarkable advances in observation systems, numerical modelling, and communication platforms over the past decade, disaster losses — both in human and socio-economic terms — continue to rise. Critically, she noted, these losses are not evenly distributed: they disproportionately affect populations already facing structural vulnerability, limited institutional support, and constrained response options.
“The problem is no longer only about whether a warning is issued on time,” she argued. “It is about whether that warning makes sense within specific social, institutional and governance contexts — and whether people are actually able to act upon it.”
From Early Warning to Early Understanding
At the heart of Dr. Alcántara-Ayala’s keynote is a conceptual reframing she calls “early understanding” — the idea that effective warning systems must be grounded in prior knowledge of who is exposed, why certain groups face elevated risk, and what capacity people and institutions have to respond when an alert is issued. Early warning systems, she explained, are fundamentally designed to answer a temporal question: when is a hazardous event likely to occur? Early understanding, by contrast, addresses the social and structural questions that determine whether a warning can be acted upon at all.
Across hazards and regions, she identified a recurring and troubling pattern: forecasts are technically sound, warnings are issued on time, yet action is delayed, partial, or absent — especially among those already facing structural vulnerability. This, she argued, is not a failure of forecasting. It is a gap between warning and understanding.
A Vision Aligned with the PEOPLE Project
The ideas at the core of Dr. Alcántara-Ayala’s keynote do not only reflect her research — they are foundational to the work of the PEOPLE Project, of which she serves as Co-chair. The PEOPLE Project (Progressing EW4All Oriented to Partnerships and Local Engagement) is built on the premise that reducing disaster risk requires placing people — their knowledge, vulnerabilities, constraints, and capacities — at the centre of early warning design and implementation.
Her keynote gave vivid expression to the PEOPLE Project’s core objectives. The emphasis on understanding structural vulnerability, connecting scientific hazard knowledge with social dimensions of exposure, bridging disciplinary and institutional silos, and linking early warning with longer-term governance processes — all of these themes are integral to the PEOPLE Project’s agenda. In choosing Dr. Alcántara-Ayala to deliver the opening keynote, the WMO/WWRP conference positioned this people-centred paradigm at the very forefront of the global discussion.
Rethinking People-Centred Early Warning
One of the keynote’s most important contributions was its precise and demanding definition of what “people-centred” should mean in practice. The term, Dr. Alcántara-Ayala observed, is now widely used in early warning discourse — but is often applied loosely, reduced to a form of participation appended at the end of the warning chain. She insisted on a more rigorous meaning: a truly people-centred early warning system recognises that risk is socially differentiated, that people experience and respond to warnings differently depending on their exposure, vulnerability, and access to resources.
“People are not the last mile of early warning,” she stated plainly. “They are integral components of the system itself.” This means engaging seriously with local knowledge, lived experience, and community memory — not as supplementary inputs, but as essential elements of how risk is understood and managed.
The Landslide Example: When Warnings Are Not Enough
To illustrate why early understanding matters, Dr. Alcántara-Ayala drew on the example of landslide early warning — a field in which technically robust systems have been deployed across mountainous and peri-urban regions worldwide. Rainfall thresholds, slope monitoring, and alert protocols can indicate danger with reasonable accuracy. And yet, landslide impacts recur in the same locations, affecting the same populations.
The reason, she explained, is not that warnings are absent. It is that exposure and vulnerability are deeply embedded in long-term processes: land-use planning failures, housing scarcity, informal settlement patterns, and limited livelihood alternatives. For many residents, acting on a warning is not straightforward — evacuation may mean losing income, leaving assets behind, or having nowhere safe to go. Without early understanding of how risk is produced and constrained, early warning alone cannot prevent recurring losses.
A Call to Action: Science, Policy, and Practice
Dr. Alcántara-Ayala closed with an explicit and multi-directional call to action. For science, she called for truly integrated research that brings social and physical sciences together from the outset — not as occasional collaborators but as equal partners in knowledge production. For policy, she urged that early warning be embedded within broader governance and development processes, including land-use planning and social protection, rather than treated as a standalone technical function. For practice, she stressed the need for sustained, meaningful engagement with communities, with lived experience and local knowledge recognised as central to how early warning systems function — or fail.
Her final words were both a challenge and an inspiration to the assembled conference delegates: “May we continue to invest not only in faster systems but in deeper knowledge — not only in detection but in interpretation — not only in warning but in trust and preparedness. When understanding comes first, warning becomes meaningful, and lives and assets are protected.”
