Strengthen local disaster management capacity and focus on urban planning - Piyoosh

"Add local level disaster management plans along with benchmarks and resilience indicators for Urban Planning." - Piyoosh, Local Government Network, India

Although a lot has been discussed or focussed on institutional strengthening and capacity building over the years what we seen something is that silently shaped resilient people. They not only strengthened themselves but also responded to disasters. However, what is necessary today is to recognise these resilient people / communities and strengthen the local disaster management response system. Documents do exists but in reality it follows lots of bureaucratic structures that reduces the crucial response time. Over the ten years we have seen many other forms of disaster which can be linked to Post Tsunami Disaster Management. Where we found success in Phailin / Hudhud in Odisha, it continued its damage in Andhra Pradesh. The disaster in Uttarakhand is another example of still needing actions. Even though people of Odisha responded properly in Phailin / Hudhud in saving human lives, the economic loss was much higher. Same time we also saw in Vishakapatnam even a concrete building is not enough when heavy wind heated the glass walls of the structure and put lives in danger. Even today the proposed Doppler radar is still not fully installed as it was supposed to be when it was planned.

However, while celebrating the success made during the last one decade we must not forget the opportunities to improve our system when global leaders meet in Sendai in less than 100 days. I feel that local level disaster Management Plan along with benchmarks in Urban Planning (focusing on resilient indicators) is a must for Global leaders to add into the declaration. This is in addition to some short of benchmark on how to reduce the economic loss along with human loss by investing more GDP in DRR. Finally a mechanism to hear the VOICE of Local Government and Community at large. Governments need to plan for effective Disaster Management in future course of action along with keeping in mind the indicators of Climate Change & Resilient Cities / Community indicators at core of the deliberation or planning.