The Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh are among the most landslide-prone in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Community-based early warning systems can benefit from additional satellite-based observations and forecasts, but there are many critical steps in transitioning global data to actionable information at a local level. To address these gaps, and to promote locally led development, the SERVIR Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) hub hosted at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has launched several small grants opportunities since 2014.
One of those small grants focused on developing a dynamic web-based landslide early warning system, led by Shahinoor Rahman and Bayes Ahmed who were at the time affiliated the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology-Japan Institute of Disaster Prevention and Urban Safety (BUET-JIDPUS). The SERVIR Science Coordination Office at MSFC assisted ICIMOD in providing scientific oversight for these small grants and connecting grantees to other NASA scientists working on related issues in the HKH region. During and since the small grant, Ahmed and Rahman have advanced their landslide early warning applications. They have also attended several conference sessions (including those convened by SERVIR) and published several papers with SERVIR-HKH researchers.
Their ongoing engagement with the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) has resulted in a formal adoption of their landslide early warning system (LEWS) by BMD (https://live4.bmd.gov.bd/p/Landslide-Warning), further strengthening the national hydro-meteorology agency’s capabilities to use satellite data to for early warning. Prior to the SERVIR-HKH small grant, Ahmed was a My Community, Our Earth (MyCOE) / SERVIR fellow through the Association of American Geographers. He is now as Associate Professor at University College London. Rahman is an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey City University. Both continue to study and teach on disaster risk reduction in the development and humanitarian contexts.
