Disaster research as a making tool for safer building practices

Abstract

Natural disasters pose a growing threat to the development strategies of developing countries like Sri Lanka by destroying infrastructure and productive capacity, interrupting economic activity, and creating irreversible changes in the natural resource base. As Vermeiren (1993) says, with increasing frequency, countries are facing situations in which scarce resources that were earmarked for development projects have to be diverted to relief and reconstruction following disasters, thus setting back economic growth. Disasters also directly impact on the foreign exchange earnings capacity of a country, at a time when extra resources are needed to finance imports of food, energy, and inputs for the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. If sustainable development is to be achieved, countries will have to take effective measures to reduce their vulnerability to natural disasters. As a consequence, property insurance, the traditional mechanism for reducing economic risk from catastrophic events, is no longer as available or affordable as in the past. This development is now forcing property owners and developers to seriously look at other mechanisms to minimize the consequences of natural disasters. Time has come to practice disaster loss reduction in a systematic way, as an integral part of ongoing development planning and investment.

The research community has produced a vast body of knowledge on structural and non-structural mitigation measures designed to prevent or reduce the impact of natural disasters. The problem is that this information remains to a large extent within the domain of the research community and its scientific papers. The challenge consists in translating this information into a format that can be understood by the development community, and in disseminating it to property owners, developers, and government planners.The benefits of long-term hazard mitigation go beyond economics, as the reduction in vulnerability to disasters contributes to individual security, social stability and sustainable development. Nevertheless, economic arguments built on a sound benefit-cost analysis are essential when one has to defend the use of scarce resources for investment in mitigation. In this paper, authors wish to share some of the findings from a study conducted on tsunami reconstruction in the East Coast of Sri Lanka.