Understanding warning chain failure in compounding urban climate hazards through an occupational security framework with comparative evidence from Pakistan and Canada

Cities now face compounding and cascading weather and climate hazards, in which heatwaves, urban and flash flooding, wildfire smoke and air quality crises interact across space and time to overwhelm the institutions charged with forecasting, warning and preparedness. This paper asks a single question of that convergence: why do forecastable urban compound hazards become mass casualty events despite warning information existing within the institutional system? Taking the warning chain, the sequence of translations through which a forecast becomes protective action at the household scale, as its unit of analysis, the paper argues that recurrent warning chain failure is not primarily technical but ideological: three mutually reinforcing formations, neoliberalism, colonialism in its contemporary continuations, and anthropocentrism, structure the institutional arrangements through which the chain holds or is severed. Drawing on occupational security, a values-based framework grounded in sustainability, justice, peace, compassion, and authenticity with accuracy, and on Actor-Network Theory and transectional analysis, the paper examines two urban systems selected on a dual comparative logic: most-different on the capacity dimensions conventionally invoked to explain governance performance, and most-similar on the theorized cause, a shared British colonial administrative and planning inheritance whose contemporary continuations the cases trace along divergent settler-colonial and extraction-colonial paths. In Pakistani cities, colonial planning inheritance and neoliberal structural adjustment produced the conditions under which the 2015 Karachi heatwave, the 2022 and 2025 monsoon floods, and the 2024 Lahore smog crisis became mass casualty events despite forecastable hazards. In Canadian cities, settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous fire and land stewardship and neoliberal jurisdictional fragmentation produced the 2021 British Columbia heat dome mortality and the 2023 wildfire smoke emergency. Comparative analysis shows that identical governance logics generate warning chain failure across divergent national contexts. A five-phase methodology offers a pathway toward people-centred, multi-knowledge and ecologically grounded preparedness, with nature-based solutions identified as its most accessible entry point.