by Kalana Cooray

Created on: August 03, 2010   Last Updated: August 05, 2010

Community Based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) is one of the best Disaster Management methodologies. We all represent our own community. Therefore we need to prepare our community to face the emergencies and natural hazards. The community should know their risk. It is very dynamic and community to community, it is different. Some communities may be prone to floods while some communities may be prone to earthquakes. The other natural hazards like Tornadoes, Tsunami and Land slides are increasing very rapidly in European, Asian and African regions.

CBDRM has a scientific approach in the community. As in steps, it is some- what similar to below.

1. Formation of Community/Village Disaster Management Committee - This can be a Community Based Organization, group of village leaders get together to conduct disaster management activities in their community. This must be a volunteer organization.

2. Conduct Hazard, Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment - VDMC need to facilitate their own community to find the information on their specific hazards, Capacity and Vulnerability prior to making their community Disaster Management Plan.

3. Prepare the Community Disaster Management Plan.

4. Implement the Plan with continuous monitoring and timely evaluations - the major components of the plan is preparedness measures such as train and formed community teams on response like First Aid, Early Warning Dissemination, Search and Rescue, Community simulations and Disaster Mitigation activities.

5. Think about the sustainability of VDMC - VDMC is a volunteer organization. How they will find resources? They can find some resources by their own community, they can do fund raising activities and create a fund, link with other organizations such as local authority, NGO, INGO or even private companies.

After you read the above 5 steps, you would think how simple this is. Yes, you are correct and wrong. This is very simple and sometimes very difficult. It depends on the community contribution to implement CBDRM. There should be a strong leadership within the community to kick off this scientific method on the ground. Once it is done, believe me this will enhance the capacity of the community to live and cope with future Disasters.

In order to prove what I said in above, here is a live and true example.

Sri Lanka Red Cross Society (SLRCS) has implemented a large scale CBDRM program in the country. It has covered 193 communities. Maradana community of Kalutara is one of the communities of the program. When SLRCS oriented the village leaders about the concept they were not too interested. However due to strong mobilization of SLRCS the village has successfully implemented the above 5 steps. The said community has faced flash floods in May 2010. They were able to respond to this disaster before the external assistance reached them. The significant thing is, this VDMC has assisted their neighbouring village by providing 1000 + cooked meals packs using their own raised funds.

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