PROMISE
advocates strongly for decentralizing the
disaster risk management scope to the local
government sector to facilitate building
safer communities. As evident from more
developed countries that by doing so, the
impacts of disasters can be reduced to a
greater extent, as well as better community
preparedness can be achieved. The areas
where integration of mitigation and
preparedness could be possible are:
-
Local
government level disaster management
committees to strengthen the
participatory governance process
-
Urban
land-use planning for avoidance or
minimizing the exposure to hazard events
-
Building
by laws to have stronger and
hazard-resistant construction of houses,
buildings and infrastructure
-
Emergency
response planning for better
preparedness
-
Annual
budget allocations to have consistency
in budgetary provisions for risk
management activities, etc.
It can often
be observed that the activities and
functional responsibilities of such
institutions are rarely decentralized or the
authority of such institutions has not been
adequately delegated to lower levels of
government. This needs to be viewed as a
hindrance for achieving disaster resilience
at the community and local levels. The
positive side, though, is that in a few
countries certain elements of risk
management is being handled successfully by
local government institutions such as
emergency health services, fire services,
ambulance services, etc. Since now many
countries are looking at possibilities for
decentralization of functions of the center,
there is a window of opportunity to
integrate disaster risk reduction in the
normal business of the local government
sector.
Due to the
varying nature of policy and local
governance structure of the PROMISE program
target countries, the first task should be
to carry out a situation analysis in the
respective country. The ADPC publication
2006 Guidebook on Advocacy Integrating
CBDRM into Government Policy and Programming
lists
out several steps to be adopted in
successful advocacy campaigns.
Advocacy
Resources
Until 2005,
ADPC had implemented the Asian Urban
Disaster Mitigation Program (AUDMP) that
advocated for Urban Disaster Risk
Management. This advocacy was adopted
because disaster impacts in urban areas are
much higher than other areas, and as and
more areas in Asia are getting urbanized,
future potential disaster losses in urban
areas can be much higher. Since PROMISE is
a continuation of AUDMP, the advocacy for
urban disaster mitigation is also adopted.
Here follows a list of resources within this
advocacy:
ADPC annually
convenes a Regional Consultative
Committee
(RCC) meeting where all the national
disaster management focal points meet and
discuss important matters related to risk
management at regional and national levels.
ADPC has
developed around 15 case studies
under its Safer Cities series to present the
experience in different aspects of urban
risk management.
ADPC conducts
capacity building programs to present
the methodology for assessing vulnerability
and risk at the urban level and issues
related to urban risk management. Some of
the capacity building programs developed and
successfully conducted by ADPC during the
last few years are Urban Disaster Management
(UDM) course, Earthquake Vulnerability
Reduction for Cities (EVRC) course, Urban
Flood Mitigation (UFM) course and
Technological Risk Mitigation for Cities (TRMC)
course.
Presentation Materials
-
ADPC
-
Bangladesh
-
Pakistan
-
Philippines
-
Sri Lanka
-
Vietnam
