These voicemails save lives

For residents of Prek Touch, Cambodia — right on the banks of the Mekong River — flooding is a regular part of life. But as those floods worsen due to climate change, it’s getting harder to adapt. Along with other flood-prone regions throughout Southeast Asia, government officials are facing an issue: how to deliver widespread weather warnings in a timely, effective way. One solution that’s working for Prek Touch? Voicemails. Today on the show, NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher https://www.npr.org/people/384067907/rebecca-hersher explains how a simple phone alert can prompt preparation, increase evacuation, and save lives. Interested in more stories about natural disaster preparedness? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hello, Short Wavers. I am NPR correspondent Camila Domonoski, filling in as host. And today, we are going on a trip with Rebecca Hersher from NPR's climate desk. Hey, Becky.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  So where are we headed?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  We're going to Cambodia, specifically to the central Cambodian village of Prakthush. It's right next to the Mekong River.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  And when were you there?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  So I was there in December. I visited with an NPR team that included producer Ryan Kelman and interpreter Tat Odom. And we wanted to visit this particular place because of something kind of surprising that's happening there, something related to its location, which is right next to this massive river.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  The Mekong River, right? One of the biggest rivers in the world.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And this river is everything to the people in this community. It's a fishing village. On the afternoon that we arrived, some women were fixing fishing nets, others were cleaning the day's catch. A lot of the men who had gone out fishing really early in the morning were resting. Kids were messing around on the boats, which are parked all along the edge of the river.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  That sounds amazing, actually.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, really idyllic. You know, life is good there in many, many ways. But living next to the Mekong also means that floods are a part of life. And like a lot of places, the floods here are getting more severe because of climate change, which means they're getting more dangerous for the people who live near the water. And the people in Prakthush and in other parts of Cambodia are using really simple technology to protect themselves from these increasingly extreme floods.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  So today on the show, the profound lifesaving power of simple, low-tech weather warnings, and the quest to protect everyone on the planet from climate-driven disasters. I'm Camila Domonoski, and you're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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• 3:41Speaker 01

  Okay, Becky, you said that the floods in Cambodia and in a lot of parts of the world are getting worse because of climate change. Why is that scientifically?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Okay, so there are a couple of reasons. One is sea level rise. So as the earth heats up, water that used to be permanently frozen, like glaciers and polar ice caps, are melting. And that's adding water to the oceans. The oceans are also getting hotter. Hotter water expands, so it takes up more space. And so you add that all up, and sea levels are rising all over the world, which is causing more severe flooding for people who live on the coast. The other big reason, though, is rain. I really feel like this one flies under the radar. Like, everyone's always thinking about sea level rise, but rain is a really big deal. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so when it rains, it pours, literally. And when a lot of water falls in a short period of time, the ground can't soak it all

• 4:36Speaker 02

  up, and that is when you get a flood.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so sea level rise, rain, which of these is happening in Cambodia?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Well, they're both happening in Cambodia, but rain is the most relevant one in the village we visited. So Cambodia and Southeast Asia more broadly experience monsoons, these massive seasonal rainstorms that cause some flooding. That's a normal thing in this part of the world. But climate change is making monsoons more extreme and less predictable. So periods of unseasonable drought followed by this torrential rain.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  And torrential rain causes bigger floods, I have to imagine.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Bigger than what used to happen. And last year was a particularly bad year for flooding in Prakthush. I talked to two local fish sellers about it, Klee Polly and Sen Sura. Did this neighborhood flood?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  No.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Broken water come to destroy the house. So the other voice you hear there is Tat Odom, the Cambodian journalist and interpreter who worked with me. The women told us that the water nearly destroyed their homes three times in the fall of 2025 alone. And that last flood in November was the worst one, which was strange, actually, because usually the strongest monsoon rains come earlier than that.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's that unpredictability piece that you were talking about. The floods are, they're getting worse, but they're also happening at like weird times.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Which makes them more dangerous because people aren't expecting them as much. And the water in November was really powerful, Polly told us. People are gesturing like it was up to their necks? Yeah. The number? Yeah. And the select other? Oh, the line above it? Line, yeah, yeah. That's this year? Yeah, yeah. Wow. So she was pointing across the street at her neighbor's house, which is raised off the ground on like 20-foot pillars to keep the water out. And the water line from the flood was about 15 feet off the ground.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Phew, that's a lot.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a ton of water. You know, and the water is moving. So no one would stand a chance in that kind of flood. They're just super, super deadly. And just last year, floods killed hundreds of people in five countries across Southeast Asia. In 2022, floods killed more than 1,000 people in Pakistan, displaced millions more. Now, those floods made headlines. The one in Prakthush didn't really get any attention outside Cambodia, but it was just as dangerous. So this was a really bad year? Yeah, that is a bad one.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So what happened in Praktoosh? How did the women you met survive all of that water?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  They survived with voicemails.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Voicemails?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, voicemails and a couple other things. That's what saved their lives. And to understand why, we have to talk a little bit about how weather warnings work.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So like when a storm is coming, you mean the warning that comes from your weather forecasters?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. In the United States, the National Weather Service issues, you know, official warnings that trigger alerts on the radio, on television, on cell phones. Like, your phone might buzz or make an alarm sound if there's a flash flood warning in your area. You've probably gotten those in the summer, right?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, big thunderstorms, flash floods. Everyone's phones will go off at once if you're all hanging out together.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Totally. And those alerts save lives. The US is a great example of this, actually. This country has some of the lowest per capita fatality rates from weather in the world, even though we have widespread exposure to heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, extreme thunderstorms. And that's according to an annual climate risk analysis sponsored by the German government. But millions of people in poorer countries, they do not get effective warnings the way we do. About half the world's least developed and small island nations don't have early warning systems, according to a 2025 United Nations report.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  So people just have no idea when a flood or a hurricane or a heatwave is coming?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, which leads to deaths. Here is United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres in a speech last year.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Disaster-related mortality is at least six times lower in countries with good early warning systems in place.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So the UN and other groups are trying to fix this problem. Since 2022, the UN and the World Bank and other contributors, they have spent more than $4 billion on weather warning systems. And the goal is to protect everyone on Earth by 2027, although that's very soon. The UN acknowledges that it will likely not meet that goal. Still, the money, it is flowing, and some places are seeing progress, including Cambodia, which the UN has touted as a success story, which is really one of the reasons that I wanted to visit.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what did you find out? What's going on with the weather warnings in Cambodia?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Well, they've made progress. So as of like a decade ago, there really wasn't any modern system for warning people about flooding in Cambodia. But that has been changing with the help of money from nonprofit groups and from the UN itself. Residents who used to get, you know, basically no warning about floods now get flood forecasts up to five days in advance, which is a huge upgrade. And people in riverside communities like Prakthush, they get warnings now and they get them via voicemail.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Are we talking like a regular voicemail or is it something more high-tech?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  No, but it's literally like a normal voicemail. But the message is a flood warning, not like a fun message from your friend. Here's an excerpt of one.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  This says, "There will be minor flooding that may affect your area in Tavungkum province." And then it gives directions about how to evacuate. Anyone in the country can opt in to getting these warnings. You can also sign up to get text warnings on the popular messaging app Telegram.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Okay. I have to say, I feel like most of the voicemails I have right now are spam messages. Does this actually work? Because I mostly ignore my inbox.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I had the same question. I was like, okay, voicemail, like, great. But people really seem to take these warnings seriously. Like before that terrible November flood hit Prakthush, Khyi Polly got a voicemail warning on her phone. And she says in the past, they might have sheltered in their homes when the water was rising and just hoped that the water wouldn't get too high. But now that they get these warnings, no one stays. She and her family immediately packed up their belongings, including their chickens.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  She explains, "When we heard the announcement, we took our children to the safe house. And that's like a government-run evacuation site up the road."

• 11:27Speaker 01

  All right, that's a voicemail success story right there.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  But what about the people who haven't signed up for those warnings? Or, you know, people who don't even have cell phones?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  They actually also evacuated. So the village chief hooked his phone up to his car speaker and drove it through town, broadcasting the message on repeat. He does that every time there's a warning. And that's actually how 82-year-old Kar Samah and his wife found out.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  "They announced it via loudspeaker, Samah told me. And then a neighbor gave the elderly couple a ride to the evacuation center. When the floodwaters went down, everyone went home. Residents said there was one fatality. It was a young child whose family lives on a boat, so they couldn't evacuate. And by the time we visited town about a month after the flood, life in Prakthush was back to normal."

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Does every town in Cambodia have this kind of warning system? And the community-minded neighbors who make sure that everybody actually gets the warning?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  No. So Prakthush is a leader on this. And that's in part because it is so prone to flooding. It was a pilot site that got UN funding over the last three years to help local leaders make evacuation plans, you know, come up with that plan to plug your phone into your speaker and drive through town. But UN-affiliated agencies are planning to spend an additional $7.8 million to expand the work across the country.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  You know, it seems like this work has been pretty successful. So are there projects like this in other countries, too?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Dozens of countries around the world have similar initiatives. Cambodia is just an example of a place where the benefits are already tangible, at least on a relatively small scale.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And definitely not to discount those benefits. It sounds like a lot of lives were saved here. But just listening to you describe the experiences of people in Prakthush, I'm also thinking about what wasn't saved, what it's still washed away.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. That came up in so many of the conversations I had in Prakthush and also in other flood-prone parts of Cambodia. And particularly with people who live in places that are mostly reliant on farming as opposed to fishing, floods are washing away their seeds, they're destroying crops at an absolutely huge scale. And more than half the people in Cambodia are directly involved in agriculture. That's according to a UN survey from last year. So even with the warnings in place, flooding is still causing really big problems for Cambodia's economy.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Add it to the list, right, of ways that climate change is really, really expensive.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  So expensive. Oh, my gosh. Because the damage plus the investment to fix the problem, to bring these warnings to people. Protecting crops from flooding would actually require even more expensive, high-tech work. You'd have to upgrade to long-term weather forecasts for the region. And that would allow farmers to decide where and when and even what to plant, given what people thought the weather was going to be over the next, like, three to six months. So that would take a lot of money.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, OK. So right now, short-term weather warnings can save lives, but it would take long-term weather forecasts to save those livelihoods, if you will.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Becky, for this reporting.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  If you liked this episode, follow us on the NPR app or wherever else you're listening to this from. It really helps the show. Also, definitely check out Becky's digital story, which includes more context and some gorgeous photos from photojournalist Ryan Kelman. It's on npr.org. We'll link it in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. And I'm Camila Domonoski. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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