Risk reduction must be climate smart - Mihir Bhatt

"All capacity building efforts related to disaster risk reduction should be closely aligned with climate change adaptation to overcome from the contemporary challenges of sustainable resilience building. Risk reduction must be climate smart."  - Mihir Bhatt, AIDMI, Gujarat

On December 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean Tsunami claimed more than 225000 lives and wreaked devastation on a hitherto unprecedented scale in several countries. 2014 marks ten years to that human tragedy. Having elicited the collective grief of the world community, the ten years after this tragedy saw a lot of progress in disaster mitigation practices around the world. However, there still is a lot that needs to be done to safeguard the world from such disasters. Newer challenges like climate change have necessitated new modes of thought and planning in the area of resilience building.

In these 10 years, the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) has been spearheading efforts to build the resilience of the vulnerable communities of South Asia against the detrimental impacts of disasters. Towards this end, AIDMI has aimed to protect the assets of such vulnerable communities. For it is now unanimously acknowledged among humanitarian practitioners, that the essence of effective disaster management lies in not only reducing the death toll from disasters to zero but also in minimizing loss and damage caused by the interface of disasters and climate change.

Thus, India’s all capacity building efforts related to disaster risk reduction should be closely aligned with climate change adaptation to overcome from the contemporary challenges of sustainable resilience building as faced by practitioners, researchers and decision makers.

Further research is greatly needed on the economics of climate sensitive risk reduction. Important questions on economic incentives and behaviours, decision making, the value of information, and behaviour under uncertainty need to be raised and answered. All India’s future efforts for risk reduction must be climate smart.