How virtual reality is helping Nepal’s students prepare for landslides

This case study belongs to a compendium of good practices and success stories in disaster risk reduction shared during the 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GP2025). These stories reflect the real-world progress being made by governments, communities, and organizations around the world to reduce risk and build resilience.

A new initiative by the Climate, Risk and Resilience Lab in 2024 showcased a powerful way to letting students experience a landslide before it even happens. Using immersive virtual reality (VR), students in Nepal are now able to "walk through" a simulated landslide, giving them a visceral understanding of the risks around them. 

Binod Prasad Parajuli, founder of the Climate, Risk and Resilience Lab, emphasizes that receiving information about hazards is not enough on its own; people need to feel the risk in order to act on it. By merging VR with local knowledge, 360-degree and aerial images of landslides in Bajhang and Bajura districts in Nepal were used to create virtual reality (VR) content packaged into web and mobile applications for the Meta Oculus Quest 2 VR platform, customized with embedded awareness and adaptation measures.

Virtual reality meets real-world risks in Nepal’s schools

This initiative created a powerful emotional and cognitive connection for young people. It helped bridge the gap between abstract warnings and lived experience. IT has been piloted with 500 students thus far, and results show that students come away not only informed, but empowered to take preventive measures; whether that’s advocating for safer infrastructure, sharing knowledge with family, or responding swiftly to danger.

This use of VR shows how technology, when grounded in community and culture, can spark real behavioral change.

Source: As shared at the GP2025 Media Hub interview