Rebecca Hersher

And that's actually how 82-year-old Khar Sama and his wife found out.

They announced it via loudspeaker, Samad 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.

By the time we visited town about a month after the flood, life in Praktish was back to normal.

No.

So Prechtush 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.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

That came up in so many of the conversations I had in Praktush 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.

You know, floods are washing away their seeds, they're destroying crops at an absolutely huge scale.

And more than half of the people in Cambodia are directly involved in agriculture.

That's according to a UN survey from last year.