On 05 December 2024, the European Space Agency

The World Space Forum 2024, organized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in collaboration with Germany, Peru and the United Arab Emirates, has officially opened its doors in Bonn, Germany, setting the stage for three days of transformative discussions on international collaboration and space sustainability.

UN-SPIDER and the Centre for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces of the University of Bonn (ZFL) joined forces to organise the UN-Spider/ZFL Expert Meeting ‘Confronting the Challenges of Natural Hazards and Climate Change: Solutions from the Space Community’ on 02 December 2024. The Expert Meeting was organised as a pre-event to the United Nations World Space Forum 2024, also held in the UN Campus in Bonn, Germany.

Across the globe, natural hazards have triggered widespread death and destruction, with the human and economic impact of disasters continuing to rise. Despite ongoing advancements in disaster risk governance and comprehensive risk management, Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs), and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) continue to experience devastating impacts, eroding hard-won development gains.

Since several decades ago, developed and developing countries began to implement early warning systems to reduce the impacts of natural hazards such as severe weather, floods, and tsunamis. In March 2015, 187 Members States of the United Nations committed to substantially increase the availability of, and access to multi-hazard early warning system as one of the targets included in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

Floods are impacting many communities around the world, triggering devastating disasters as in the case of the recent floods in Southern Brazil in May 2024, in the South Eastern United States in September 2024, and more recently in Valencia, Spain at the end of October 2024.  Since several decades ago, early warning systems have been implemented to minimize impacts in case of floods and other hazards.  Flood forecasting is one of the key essential elements of any flood early warning systems.