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Recovery from weather-related disasters is a great challenge for the Nepalese Government and any future increase in these disasters from enhanced climate variability and change will certainly add to this challenge. As is the case in most developing countries, disaster insurance has not been applied in Nepal as an adaptation mechanism to reduce disasters-related vulnerability. However, community-based micro-insurance schemes in the livestock and cash crop sectors have been successful established in some villages. Furthermore, studies indicate that collective or community-based disaster insurance could be one of the options for post-disaster loss sharing measures in Nepal and has the potential to contributing to poverty alleviation through distributing the impacts of disasters more evenly. This project has the twin goals of initiating a collective disaster insurance scheme in Western Nepal and establishing communication between the National Meteorological Service of Nepal and the Community Based Disaster Preparedness (CBDP) Units. CBDP units exist in many communities throughout Nepal and are organized by the Nepalese Red Cross Society, the leading Nepalese disaster management organization. This organizational structure is based on the philosophy that initial emergency assistance will always come from within the community. Implementing a community disaster insurance scheme will be an important measure to reduce disaster impacts by increasing the economic resilience of the community, while enhanced communication between national weather forecast systems and local community CBDP units will reduce the overall vulnerability to and ultimate loss from disasters. These adaptive measures will assist in achieving some of the development goals of the Nepalese government, including establishing early warning systems throughout the country by 2017, significantly reducing social and economic losses from disasters by 2027 and alleviating poverty. |
