Because of its fragile and rugged topography, Bhutan is highly vulnerable to natural hazards including flooding, landslides, glacial lake outburst floods, earthquakes, and forest fires. In August 2024, severe flash floods in areas of the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, caused widespread damage to infrastructure, streets, and homes. 

Determined to accelerate its journey to resilience in keeping with its 13th Five Year Plan, the Royal Government of Bhutan has been bolstering its drive to strengthen risk-informed decision-making. The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank, including through the Japan-World Bank Program for Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Management (DRM) in Developing Countries, have been a major partner in those efforts. 

Under the $4.9 million Strengthening Risk Information for Disaster Resilience Project, GFDRR has supported the development of the Bhutan DRM Portal, a user-friendly, common platform for officials and policy makers to share and use risk data to inform urban and infrastructure planning and decision-making. Drawing on data from a nationwide multi-hazard risk assessment, the development of this portal was made possible through GeoNode—a web-based, open-source software for accessing, sharing, and visualizing geospatial data that was also created with GFDRR support in 2009.

The Portal includes interactive dashboards to enable DRM officials and policymakers to glean trends and insights from historical risk data. Users will be able to share data using the Portal through a reporting tool. 

Operationalization of the DRM Portal is ongoing, with data on flood risk already integrated into the platform. Data on earthquake and landslide risk are expected to be integrated by June 2026. Analytical work, also supported by GFDRR, which will bolster the data integrated into the platform, is currently underway. For instance, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is conducting an earthquake loss estimate spanning 20 Dzongkhags or administrative districts, in addition to a landslide risk assessment of national highways. The type of data included in the portal has been informed by a user needs assessment covering key agencies involved in DRM, such as the Department of Local Governance and Disaster Management and the ministry. 

A technical team, with the support of GFDRR, has begun to provide training and technical assistance on a prototype of the portal to officials from those same key agencies. With the goal of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the Bhutan DRM Portal, this will help enable the portal to systematically pull relevant data from the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), the government’s centralized digital platform for gathering, sharing, and analyzing geospatial information. The Bhutan DRM Portal has been designed to be compliant with the metadata standards for NSDI, which should facilitate that effort. 

Beyond the Bhutan DRM Portal, GFDRR is continuing to support a range of digital tools, platforms, and analytics to strengthen risk-informed decision-making in Bhutan, including at the community level. For example, the Agrometeorological Decision Support System (ADSS), which uses machine learning to generate specific crop advisories for farmers based on weather data, has been enhanced and scaled up. The ADSS has recently issued early warnings ahead of heavy rains to 21 gewogs, or groups of villages, covering 57,000 people. The ADSS advisories will be further enhanced by the integration of artificial intelligence-powered, medium-range weather forecasts that are being developed by the National Center for Hydrology and Meteorology. GFDRR support is also being provided to enhance Bhutan’s road asset management system, including the collection of 17,300 kilometers of road data and improvements to data collection methods, analysis, and instrumentation, all of which will be integrated into the planned web-based system with geographic information system capabilities under the $300 million Accelerating Transport and Trade Connectivity in Eastern South Asia Project.