Disaster Alerts Reach More People Than Ever, but a Third of Those Warned Can’t Act on Them

Text messages reached more than 600,000 phones about 38 minutes after a collapsing glacier near Nepal’s border with Tibet sent a torrent of ice, rock, and mud down the Trishuli River valley on August 26. For many people downstream, the alerts came too late, and residents and researchers say they offered little guidance on what to do. The flood killed more than 1,400 persons and left over 5,000 missing.Nepal’s catastrophe illustrates a problem that a major new survey now documents with numbers. Among people hit by a disaster in the past five years who received at least one advance warning, 36 percent said they were unable to act on it r 13 by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a British safety charity.Gallup carried out more than 143,000 interviews across 140 countries and territories in 2025 for the poll. Projected to the global population aged 15 and older, the results suggest that roughly 1.1 billion people, about one in five, were hit by a disaster in the previous five years. About four in five of them had some warning beforehand; an estimated 220 million got none at all. In polling done before the August 26 flood, only 47 percent of Nepalis impacted by an earlier recent disaster said they had been warned.The findings arrive about 14 months before a deadline set by the United Nations in 2022 for putting every person on earth under the protection of an early warning system. They suggest that simply counting whether alerts were sent fails to tell whether they did any good.Sending the message, one disaster researcher says, is where the hard part begins.“A warning is only the start. People need to believe it, know what to do, and have the means to do it,” the dean’s professor of resilience at Northeastern University, Daniel Aldrich, tells The New York Sun.Poor Countries Get Hit Twice as Often and Are Warned LessThe divide between rich and poor countries shows up at every step. Adults in low-income countries were nearly twice as likely as those in high-income countries to be impacted by a disaster, 31 percent against 16 percent, yet less likely to be warned, 64 percent against 84 percent.Once warned, fewer than half in low-income and lower-middle-income countries were able to act, against 71 percent in wealthy ones.Central and Western Africa was the only region where fewer than half of disaster victims, 47 percent, received any advance notice at all. Only 42 percent of Chadians impacted by a disaster were warned.The report says the barriers to an effective response to an alert include a lack of resources, distrust of the source and social pressure. Part of the trouble lies in the alerts themselves, according to a researcher who studies humanitarian response.“Disaster warnings usually stop at describing the potential disaster itself. They usually do not provide (a) information on what to do, or (b) support to do those things,” an associate professor of humanitarian assistance at Tufts University, Erin Coughlan de Perez, tells the Sun. “For example, if you know a storm is coming but there is no evacuation shelter (or you don’t know where the shelter is), you are not going to evacuate.”Even people who know exactly what to do may stay put because leaving carries its own dangers.“They might not be able to afford to evacuate, or they cannot afford supplies to shelter at home,” a professor of disaster and health at University College London, Ilan Kelman, tells the Sun. “They might be scared of being fired for missing work to stay safe, of being harassed or assaulted in communal shelters, or of their home being robbed while they are away.”The pressure falls hardest on families who are already stretched thin before a storm ever forms.“People who are already under economic strain or managing other hardships have fewer discretionary resources that they can easily allocate to act on a forecast,” Ms. Coughlan de Perez explains.Mr. Aldrich points to the practical obstacles that keep people in place. “Many also lack a car, money for a bus, or a safe place to go,” he says. “Others fear losing their home, livestock, or job if they leave.”Those obstacles are not confined to poor countries. In America, 63 percent of adults told the Federal Reserve this year that they could cover a surprise $400 expense with cash or its equivalent, which leaves more than a third who could not. Evacuating ahead of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 cost households an average of $1,200, according to a Texas A&M researcher.When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, more than a quarter of the city’s households, 27 percent, did not own or have use of a car. Nationally the figure was closer to one in 10. Nineteen years later, Hurricane Helene came ashore on Florida’s Gulf Coast. In Pinellas County, nine people drowned in their homes, all of them inside an area under a mandatory evacuation order, according to the county sheriff.Shelters are meant to fill the gap, yet many people avoid them. As Hurricane Melissa bore down on Jamaica in October 2025, the country’s local government minister said shelters were open, but few people used them. Some residents cited poor conditions and bad past experiences at government shelters as their reasons for staying home.Beyond people with little money or shaky jobs, Mr. Kelman says, “those most likely to be left out of warnings include people with disabilities, people who are unhoused, people without documents, people who are incarcerated, people who are enslaved, people with informal employment, and genders, sexualities, ethnicities, castes, races, and religions who typically experience discrimination.”Why Three Alerts Work Better Than OneRepetition helps. Just 37 percent of people who got a warning through only one channel did anything about it, the poll found, compared with 51 percent of those reached in two ways and 64 percent of those reached in three ways.“Most of us do not act on a siren or a text alone,” Mr. Aldrich says. “We check with family, neighbors, and people we trust. If those ties are weak, people wait, and waiting costs lives.”Kerr County, Texas, relied largely on cellphone alerts when the Guadalupe River flooded in July 2025.The first flash flood warning from the National Weather Service went out at 1:14 a.m. A flash flood emergency followed at 4:03 a.m. At that time of night, Senator Cruz conceded, “most people” were asleep. Kerr County officials had weighed installing outdoor flood sirens as far back as 2016 but shelved the idea, with some calling the system too costly. By the time the water receded, at least 138 persons were dead, dozens of them children at Camp Mystic.What people had done at home before the warning arrived mattered more than anything else. Among warned adults with no household disaster plan and no confidence that they could protect their families, 27 percent took action. Among those with both, 83 percent did.Record Money, Uneven ReachSince Secretary-General António Guterres launched the Early Warnings for All initiative in 2022, aiming to cover everyone on earth with an early warning system by the end of 2027, the number of countries reporting multi-hazard warning systems has climbed from 113 to 136, the United Nations said last month. About 60 nations still lack one.Funding for early warning systems hit a record in 2023, yet 54 percent of reported money for national projects was concentrated in five countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, according to a United Nations tracking platform. Three-quarters came as loans and credits rather than grants.Nor is it clear that the money reaches the people who need it most.“Too often, it stops short,” Mr. Aldrich underscores. “Much of the money buys equipment at the top of the system. Less goes to the neighborhood level, where people decide whether to move.”Ms. Coughlan de Perez, meanwhile, says no one can know where the money ends up without more transparency and public evaluation. The people being missed, she says, are often those already living in hard conditions, such as in conflict zones, where public services are limited and moving around is difficult.“Certainly early warning systems have saved many lives over the last decades, but now we need to focus on those who are being left behind,” she says.In Nepal, recovery money is still trickling in. On October 22, the United Nations Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage set aside $20 million for the flood zone, the first money the fund has allocated since it was created. Donors had given the government about $102 million by the end of September, a sliver of the billions recovery will take.Before the deadline, Ms. Coughlan de Perez wants forecasters to change how they cast their predictions, arguing that “instead of forecasting what the weather will be, we need to start forecasting what the weather will do.”Mr. Aldrich would measure success by whether people move. “The goal should be judged by who acts in time, beyond who receives a message,” he says.

Disaster Alerts Reach More People Than Ever, but a Third of Those Warned Can’t Act on Them

Disaster Alerts Reach More People Than Ever, but a Third of Those Warned Can’t Act on Them

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