Climate risks cause frequent disasters in the Andean countries affecting more than half a million people every year. Acting before disasters occur can substantially reduce these impacts. This collaboration I have setup between SDC, the Zurich Foundation and the Red Cross Climate Center, aims to strengthen the anticipatory mechanism.

Augur helps to dimension flood protection and risk-informed site planning anywhere on the globe. It is an initiative funded by the “Innovation meets practice” accelerator of the Swiss Agency of Development and Cooperation, aiming to make satellite data and climate change information accessible for humanitarian actors.

This storytelling illustrates Switzerland’s Multi Hazard Early Warning System (MHEWS). It was showcased at the innovation platform of the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR) in Geneva 2019 and highlights the importance of multi-sectorial governance structures to enable efficient early warning at national scale.

Information on imminent climate hazards and mapping using GIS services is a crucial aspect in disaster response. SDC effectively enabled rapid satellite tracking of fire hotspots to fight the amazonian wildfires in Bolivia in 2019. Such services shall be made avaible through Weather4UN in the future.

The amazon rainforest is highly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Together with the photography museum Winterthur (www.fotomuseum.ch) we discussed the implications of climate change for the indigenous communities and prospects to create resilience.

In this publication in Nature Communications we contribute to the quantification of the role of climate change on past extreme weather and climate events. We present a methodology on how to correct for some short-comings in climate models to increase the robustness of event attribution.