If she has saved one life, that’s enough for Lina Cabellos, engineer, meteorologist and the driving force behind the Colombian city of Medellín’s ingenious early warning system – and that’s the answer she gives authorities when they ask about value for money. 

“Part of our success is to convince the government that these are services worth paying for,” she says. “Any life is worth saving. Here where we live in Medellín, emergencies happen all the time.”

If the United Nations had its way, there’d be more networks like these, which reap insights from both technology and people on the ground to warn of impending danger. 

Only half of the world’s nations, many of them prone to extreme weather, have any kind of early warning system in place, as do just a third of small island states, “which is incredible considering their level of exposure to risks and hazards”, said Nahuel Arenas García, chief of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Americas and Caribbean...