Geography Disaster Resilience in Nepal

The present work traces the development of the hazard, risk, and vulnerability paradigm in the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management field from its beginning to the latest achievement: "resilience". Using various case studies from Nepal, the journey takes off from the early focus on emergency response, hazard, and vulnerability assessment, via a comparative study of structural fragility and the difficult situation of small developing cities in Nepal’s periphery, to a planning and development perspective, which has a strong focus on participation, sustainability and the “power to transform” of the ’new’ concept of disaster resilience. In an emergency, shelter space is crucial for people affected by natural hazards. Emergency planners in disaster relief and mass care can greatly benefit from a sound methodology that identifies suitable shelter areas and sites where shelter services need to be improved. A methodology to rank the suitability of open spaces for contingency planning and placement of shelter in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is introduced in the first contribution (Anhorn & Khazai, 2015). The Open Space Suitability Index (OSSI) uses the combination of two different measures: a qualitative evaluation criterion for the suitability and manageability of open spaces to be used as shelter sites and another quantitative criterion using a capacitated accessibility analysis based on network analysis. The rapid urban development of the district Capital Musikot in the Middle Hills to a mid-size trade and Service center in rural Nepal increases the vulnerability of its inhabitants to natural hazards. Population growth and improved road accessibility have led to increased construction and an expansion and alteration of the built environment. Taking Musikot as a characteristic case study of rapid urban change, this article analyses its increasing local earthquake-risk in light of insufficient seismic building code implementation and risk-sensitive urban planning. The increasing fragility of the building stock is assessed using a modified seismic evaluation scheme for local building types (Anhorn et al., 2015). Almost one-fourth of all construction was found to be at high risk of damage to earthquakes. It is argued, that without proper training in earthquake-resistant construction techniques and awareness campaigns, the (mal-) adoption of modern construction materials will amplify earthquake risk in rural centers. Making a city disaster-resilient means understanding the capacity of communities and decision-makers to actively adapt to, cope with, and transform in view of potential threats. Various indicator frameworks rely on prearranged indicator sets and beneficiaries to measure resilience neglecting the need to dynamically adjust indicators to the context of specific places or sub-city levels of geography. The Resilience Performance Scorecard (RPS) is a multilevel and multi-scale self-evaluation tool that empowers stakeholders to quantitatively assess resilience parameters based on primary source information (Khazai, Anhorn & Burton, 2018). The scorecard approach leads to a highly contextualized resilience appraisal reflecting the goals and objectives of the local actors and cannot be substituted by a ready-to-go, generic questionnaire. The tool is implemented with city officials and community stakeholders of Lalitpur before and after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake. In the thesis it is claimed that the concept of a resilient city is highly normative and afflicted by the technocratic thinking that a desired state might be a) explicitly identifiable and b) uncertainties around it are controllable (Anhorn, 2018). Western principles of projectable future(s) and orderly reality, as well as (pre)defined cause and effect chains, contribute to this overestimation. Based on the “vulnerable” Status quo, “resilience measures” are suggested which often focus on one sector of the urban multi-cosmos and are trying to fix Symptoms. This is particularly true for cities and urban areas in the global south. Oversimplified Implementation strategies on “how to become resilient ” fall short on the complexity of the urban risk landscape and leave those at risk in limbo. This ‘ Urban Resilience Utopia ’ poses a threat to the core of the resilience agenda as a transformative power. The chapter reaches out to the social resilience “capacities” concept and translates it into guiding questions for planning and implementing disaster risk reduction and development interventions. The adaptive governance concept is used to evaluate the practicability of those questions using examples from Nepal. In light of the insights gained prior to and after the Nepal Earthquakes in 2015, the thesis’s results recommend to use the potential of the resilience concept by focusing on its capacity to prospective transform institutions. Resilience needs to be considered as a multi-dimensional concept, visible at multiple levels, and highly dynamic. The obstacles to operationalize resilience (still) reflect social injustice and poor governance. Therefore a shared vision based on contextualized understanding is needed, developed through on-going processes of negotiation, participation and learning.  

PhD Candidate: Johannes Anhorn
Funding: 
Duration: 2007-2012

Khazai B, Anhorn J, Burton CG (2018): Resilience Performance Scorecard: Measuring urban disaster resilience at multiple levels of geography with case study application to Lalitpur, Nepal. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 31: 604-616, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.06.012.

Anhorn J, Lennartz T & Nüsser M (2015): Rapid Urban Growth and Earthquake Risk in Musikot, Mid-Western Hills, Nepal. Erdkunde 69 (4): 307-325. doi:10.3112/erdkunde.2015.04.02.

Anhorn J, Khazai B (2015): Open Space Suitability Analysis for Emergency Shelter after an Earthquake. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussion 15:789–803. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-15-789-2015.