Sajag-Nepal has been designed from the outset to benefit a wide range of partner organisations in Nepal, and to deliver impact from the research. Our primary goal is to positively impact residents living with systemic risk. We are working to better understand the socio-political and economic processes that affect people’s everyday lives and through which systemic risk is produced and in which multi-hazards are experienced. Our work will implore those tasked with managing risk to focus on the everyday needs of residents, and ensure that efforts to reduce risk are placed within the appropriate physical and socio-political contexts. We are also working to enable local government to support residents to collectively manage their own risk by building on their own knowledge and providing new knowledge to support planning, forecasting, and messaging. And we are providing innovative means of messaging, using locally produced radio programmes, to exploit our new interdisciplinary science to improve decision-making, working with local people and local government to make this as effective as possible.
At the same time, we are supporting the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office and Humanitarian Country Team, who work with the Government of Nepal and major aid organisations in the country, to ground their earthquake and monsoon disaster preparedness plans in the best available interdisciplinary science. We are also working with the RCO and HCT to build greater awareness of the socio-political context in which their planning sits, allowing them to evaluate variations in risk caused by changing hazard as well as changing population exposure and vulnerability. We are working directly with the Government of Nepal through the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, supporting the development of the Bipad portal (https://bipadportal.gov.np/) as a primary source of multi-hazard and risk information in Nepal and building capacity to understand earthquake- and monsoon-related hazards at a national scale.
Finally, our project is helping to develop the next generation of hazard and risk specialists in Nepal by supporting 10 early-career researchers based at NSET, the Social Science Baha, and Tribhuvan University. We are delivering skills training and professional development for these researchers to provide the foundations for the future leaders of this sphere of work in Nepal.