By Masatsugu Takamatsu and Julian Palma
Imagine you live in a house with a beautiful view of downhill greens. One day after a storm you come out of the house and find the entire ground from the tip of your house is washed out for hundreds of meters. This is a real landslide that occurred in Kerala, India in August 2018.
5 million people in Kerala the most southwestern State of India, were affected by extreme and prolonged rainfall of August 2018. The monsoon caused widespread floods and more than 3,000 landslides across the state. .
In addition, .
The seismically active Himalayan-Hindu Kush mountain belt with the world-most challenging terrain also affects other South Asian countries. Earthquakes, landslides, and heavy rainfall often cause long-term disruption of transport systems in the region, resulting in economic setbacks affecting internal trade and regional integration.. Communities affected by landslides are often socially vulnerable to homelessness and, they rely on few roads for evacuation or for sourcing food and water.
Workshops
In 2016, with the objective of empowering countries in South Asia Region (SAR) in building a resilient road transport network, the World Bank launched, with support from the and the , its Building Resilience to Landslides and Geo-hazard Risk in the South Asia Region program to support policy makers and technical agencies.
The first event was launched in with the , Nepal in 2017. These workshops focused on geohazard risk management (GRM), including resilient road asset management and disaster preparedness to help strengthen the GRM capacity of policymakers and practitioners and support the development of country-specific action plans.
A third workshop was held in Wellington (2019) to explore New Zealand’s experience and advancement in building its geohazard-resilient infrastructure and asset management system. on five core themes: institutional capacity and coordination, systems planning, engineering and design, asset management and contingency programming.
The theory of change, illustrated in the figure above, indicates how the workshop series can help South Asian countries strengthen GRM capacity and apply the lessons to their own projects and country-wide capacity building. In Afghanistan, for instance, the Ministry of Transport will apply the learnings of the workshop to support the selection of risk mitigation measures along the Salang Pass through the Bank-financed
In Nepal, together with the Nepal Department of Roads (DOR), the Program hosted a slope protection design training to young road engineers and practitioners in Nepal and Bhutan so that they can assess, investigate and understand design measures for the road slope protection works. These are the good examples of how each country has moved forward to strengthen GRM following the action plans.
Governments need to protect people and assets from the impact of these disasters.
Key takeaways to build geohazard resilience:
- Spatial risk quantification - When you build a house, you want to understand hazard risks of the specific location, and the government needs to be able to judge if the area is suitable for building houses and what kind of building regulations have to be applied from a disaster risk perspective.
- Risk-informed planning - . This requires close collaboration and sharing information between agencies and stakeholders across sectors.
- Impact-based early warning - . Disaster Risk Management agencies need to closely collaborate and coordinate with HydroMet service agencies who predict and monitor inclement weather and flooding.
This GRM capacity building program is one small tool to help each government develop a comprehensive and robust geohazard risk management policy and technical framework to make a big impact on the safety of people from geohazards.