JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Joaquin Randall spent most of his life in a small historic town in Peru's Cusco region.
JOAQUIN RANDALL: I actually am the manager of my family business here. We run a hotel. We're located in the train station that goes through Machu Picchu.
SUMMERS: But he's found himself taking on a very different role lately - one that puts him and other local businesses at the forefront of helping Peru respond to threats from El Niño. NPR's Fatma Tanis reports.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: In Cusco's dramatic mountains and deep valleys, many local businesses depend on tourism, says Joaquin Randall. So when the COVID-19 pandemic came...
RANDALL: Business was closed, so we started looking at other activities that we could take on. We realized we could use our resources towards strengthening our local communities here.
TANIS: Most of the population in this region are farmers raising crops such as potatoes. Many of them burn fields for regenerating and during the dry season, that would lead to frequent wildfires.
RANDALL: Because we live in a very rugged landscape with towering mountains, fires will rage up the mountainside very quickly. So it's really essential to try and stop fires within, you know, 10 to 20 minutes of them starting.
TANIS: But it can take firefighters longer to get where they're needed. Randall remembers reading a U.N. report on forest fires that said most governments only spend about 1% of firefighting budgets on prevention.
RANDALL: So we said we're going to focus entirely on prevention, and that's just kind of really working on education and working with communities.
TANIS: Before, he says, a community member would see smoke but not know what to do next. So he set up a community WhatsApp group and got the word out.
RANDALL: And so anytime we see smoke, someone will take a picture, send it, share it with us, and then the neighbors from the exact region will go up to the place and try to stop the fires from expanding or verify that whoever is starting the fire is managing it responsibly.
TANIS: Now there are about 250 volunteers who are always watching out for smoke. They've also received training from local authorities on how to deal with fires.
RANDALL: A lot of them are elderly women that are out in the community. And they're the ones that stay home and are tending their fields and tending their animals. They're the ones that see the different situations happening.
TANIS: In areas where there's no phone reception, they have a flag system. Volunteers will raise an orange flag for emergency and yellow or green for low-risk and all-clear signals. This early warning system has been in place in four districts in Cusco. It's funded by the local businesses, including Randall's. He says it's helped reduce the number of out-of-control fires.
But there's a new challenge for the community. This year's El Niño is projected to be the strongest on record. Olga Lozano is a vice president at the Lima-based Center for Disaster Studies and Prevention. She says El Niño poses different risks to different parts of Peru. In the north, people are expecting excessive rain, flooding and landslides. In the south, where Cusco is, it means drought.
OLGA LOZANO: The government - it's impossible to help everybody because the damage is going to be very large.
TANIS: Government resources are stretched, she says. So in many small towns, people will have to help each other. Randall and the other local leaders are now trying to set up the same early warning system in all 119 districts in Cusco.
RANDALL: And we're just reaching out directly to anybody who wants to become a volunteer within their district and then be able to put together these early warning systems with the WhatsApp groups in each of the districts.
TANIS: The networks of volunteers are also working with farmers to help them prepare to stop potential fire spread.
RANDALL: It's called cortafuegos, where people will clear out a section of the shrubs to protect their villages or their farms.
TANIS: What's happening in Cusco points to a broader shift in disaster response, says Shelley Cheatham. She's the Latin America and Caribbean lead at the United Nations' humanitarian affairs office.
SHELLEY CHEATHAM: One of the things that we've definitely seen in the last few years in Peru is the growth of the local private sector business community being more involved systematically in response.
TANIS: For Randall and the volunteers in Cusco, the clock is ticking. He says they haven't had rain in several weeks, and the fires are increasing.
Fatma Tanis, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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