Building better resilience for communities vulnerable to natural disasters will help cut spending on disaster relief in future, a UK body of engineers said today.
"It is estimated that every one US dollar spent on making communities more resilient can save as much as four US dollars in disaster relief in the future," said Tim Fox, head of Energy and Environment at the London-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Releasing a report 'Natural Disasters: Saving Lives Today, Building Resilience Tomorrow,' Fox listed out its major recommendations.
Better focus on building future resilience, building local capacity through knowledge transfer and embedding the long-term engineering view in the short-term response (to disasters) were among them.
Defining resilience, the report said "it is focused on building local awareness of hazards, reducing vulnerability and enhancing the capacities of communities and their assets to cope with a range of scenarios."
"While we can do little to control a natural event, we can take steps to prevent it from becoming a disaster," it said.
The report lauded the efforts of the Surat administration in Gujarat on their decision to relocate communities from flood-prone land to "purpose-built blocks" which "successfully" reduced their physical vulnerability.
Also, the report cites the recent Uttarakhand flood fury as an "example" of the damaging consequence of "unplanned and inappropriate development" resulting in the habitation of human population in less resilient areas.
"The quicker engineers can begin infrastructure assessment and long-term reconstruction planning, the better short-term decision making will be," a recommendation in the report said.
