Published to mark the 2026 International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, themed "Resilience Starts at Home," this blog looks at what happens after a warning is issued inside the home, where El Niño's risks are felt first, and where resilience has to begin.

In Garahwa, in Ward 28 of Zimbabwe’s Chipinge District, Headman Mutape Jerera reaches for the radio before the weather turns. In his community, community members regularly tune in, including through the radio function on their mobile phones. When floods are on the way, the warning now reaches him at home, through Ndau Community Radio, in time to prepare. “If there is a threat of floods or if weather conditions are bad, the radio alerts us to prepare, so everyone is forewarned,” he says. He has lived through failed rains before, including the drought the 2023–2024 El Niño brought across southern Africa. 

What is different this time is that the warning reaches his household early enough to act on, carried the last mile by a solar-powered transmission booster that keeps the station on air, part of UNDP Zimbabwe’s Climate Adaptation, Water and Energy Programme (CAWEP), which has already reached 2.8 million people with early warnings and advisories.

Multiply Mutape by millions of households, across dozens of countries. That is the scale of this El Niño season. El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern involving warmer-than-usual surface waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which can alter rainfall and temperatures around the world. 

Preparing for these changes takes more than a forecast. A warning is only as good as a household's ability to understand and act upon it. UNDP works alongside communities and countries to strengthen their resilience to these shocks, and turn early warnings into action that saves lives.

In September 2026, WMO put the probability of El Niño persisting through February 2027 at nearly 100 percent: the most unequivocal reading its seasonal outlook has produced in the organization's 50-year history. The signal is visible in the ocean itself: the Niño 3.4 index, the benchmark measure of central Pacific sea-surface warming, had climbed to between 2.2°C and 2.6°C above average by mid-August, with waters more than 8°C above normal at depth, which is the kind of heat expected to push the event to "very strong" intensity as it peaks late this year. "This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response," said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. "We have no time to lose."

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction calls disaster risk reduction a people-centred endeavour, and nowhere is that truer than at home. Homes are where people sleep, care for one another and seek shelter; yet how a house is sited, built, financed and maintained decides whether it reduces risk or creates it. Where housing sits in flood plains, lacks disaster-resilient design, or falls outside planning and building codes, disaster becomes displacement, and the burden lands hardest on women, older people, persons with disabilities and low-income households, especially where land tenure, mobility and decision-making power are already unequal.

Closing the gap between a forecast and action at home takes support at the local level. A forecast that reaches a ministry is not the same as a warning that reaches a household in a language it understands, early enough to act on. That means getting warnings the last mile to the people who need them, building housing and social protection that account for risk, and supporting the water utilities, health systems and local governments that keep a home standing.

At UNDP, this is a part of a prospective risk management strategy: making sure the next El Niño event finds fewer homes exposed in the first place, not just fewer people unwarned.

The foundation was already there. Nearly two decades of investment in early warning systems on the ground, across more than 90 countries, reinforced this year by a USD 114 million Green Climate Fund partnership reaching seven more climate-vulnerable countries, now anchors UNDP's El Niño Anticipatory Capability 2026/2027. It structures UNDP's own response around four steps: see the risk, get ready, protect people and services, and recover stronger. This El Niño is the moment that groundwork gets tested.

In Madagascar’s Grand Sud, El Niño arrives as the opposite threat: rains that come late, or not at all. Here the warning that reaches a household will be a drought bulletin, read out on local radio and relayed by SMS and the local officials and decentralized services UNDP helped train in the Androy and Anosy regions through the EU-funded PACTE VERT programme, to read and interpret weather bulletins so a forecast becomes advice a family can use. For a farming household in one of the seven most exposed districts (Ambovombe, Bekily, Ampanihy, Beloha, Tsihombe, Amboasary or Betioky) that advice arrives early enough to act on: shift the planting calendar to the delayed rains, switch to the short-cycle seeds the regional agricultural directorates and other partners are distributing, and, for families identified as most vulnerable by local vigilance committees, receive cash assistance before the lean season bites rather than after. Behind the bulletin, a solar-powered forecasting centre, equipped through a Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF) project, keeps Météo Madagascar disseminating weather and climate information and issuing alerts, while enhancing its observations and forecasting capacities, even when the power fails, and a national anticipatory action plan running from August 2026 through March 2027 turns warning into a rehearsed response. In the Atsinanana region, through the Chine CIDCA funded TIAEWS project, strengthening the capacities of journalists and local community focal points to read, interpret and communicate weather forecasts is helping improve the dissemination of reliable and understandable weather information to communities, enabling them to better anticipate risks and take appropriate action.

Mutape's home in Garahwa and the homes of farming families across Madagascar's Grand Sud are exactly where the 2026 International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction asks us to look: the home is where risk is felt first, and where resilience, built by governments, builders, financiers and households together, has to start.