DRRM: Landslides and infrastructure in Nepal

For this week DRRM, I am taking an example of Sunkoshi landslide and its impact on infrastructure. Due to heavy rainfall, in the early morning of August 2, 2014, a landslide occurred at Jure village of Sindhupalchowk district, the northern part of the country. It killed 156 people and blocked the Sunkoshi river forming an artificial lake. About 2 dozens houses were swept away by the landslide and 2.6-megawatt hydropower station was completely submerged in the backflow of the river. The lake was about 3 km long and an estimated 7 million cubic meters volume was stored in the lake which lasted for 38 days. It destroyed about 5 kilometers of Araniko highway, the main and only one trade link to China. The average trade from this route is about US$ 400,000 per day which means US$ 15.2 million were lost. It also damaged power supply infrastructure of several hydropower projects inducing more power cut hours in the capital and other parts of the country.

Landslide:
Source: http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2014/08/02/sunkoshi-1/

The artificial lake submerging hydropower station.
Source: https://twitter.com/bewitchkapil

Landslide is the deadliest natural disasters in the country. Moreover, due to fragile geology and human occupation and their interactions have made the middle Himalayan region more vulnerable to natural disasters. Landslides and floods are common phenomena during the monsoon season. Particularly, Sunkoshi valley has experienced numerous large floods and landslides in the last three decades. In addition, the settlement along the highway which runs in the bank of Sunkoshi river has been dramatically increased in last two decades.

A landslide above Jure in 2013; the same landslide after the event on August 2, 2014.
Source: http://www.icimod.org/?q=14356

Although we cannot control natural hazards such as landslides and floods, certainly there are many ways to mitigate their adverse impacts on lives, livelihoods, and physical infrastructures. For this purpose, the information and knowledge from the past events would be of immense help to support disaster risk reduction. Such information would be invaluable for the preparation of hazard map, hazard zonation, and land use planning for the future. Also, with the help of remote sensing and automatic weather station, meteorological and hydrological variables can be measured. Such data can eventually be feed into hydrological models to prepare and install early warning systems in the region. Such activities would increase the community resilience and be prepared for the future disaster to save lives and economy in the tiny Himalayan country.  

DRRM Week 4: Personal Resilience

Personally, I feel that I follow the panarchy model of adaptive cycle in terms of personal resilience. Learning from the past mistakes, I try to re-organize myself to achieve a new set of goals which are mainly aimed for longer terms than the previous one. I try to turn a crisis into an opportunity with better and detailed work plan gained through academic learnings and practical experiences.

Evolutionary resilience: I believe that there are multiple levels of equilibrium within the systems in which it can bounce back. In addition, it can bounce back to ‘new normal’ as the previous situation would not be acceptable for the people who are living in the disaster-prone areas. However, the evolutionary resilience does not define the geographic perspective well. As disaster resilience analysis requires assimilation of physical as well as socio-economic information from many unique geographic locations, we need to consider both spatial and temporal perspectives.

DRRM Week 3: Hazard, Risk and Disaster

What is Risk?

The risk in geography is defined as the likelihood of a hazard event occurring and creating the loss. It is the actual exposure of something of human value to a hazard and is often measured as the product of the probability of an event happening and potential loss.

 (Source:http://www.backgroundalpha.com/Images/Combinaison_englais.jpg)

Difference between Hazard and Disaster?

Hazard is a naturally occurring or human induced process which has a potential to create a loss. Disaster is an actual event which has severely impacted people, communities, and systems.  Hazard is primarily understood in a physical dimension whereas disaster has social dimensions. For instance, avalanche or flood in a remote Himalayan mountain is just a hazard but if it impacts downstream population and societies, it becomes a disaster.

Hazard, Risk and Disaster in Nepali context:

Nepal is situated in an active tectonic belt. The Indian tectonic plate is submerging towards Tibetan plate and hence still raising. As it is the youngest mountain in the world, natural processes are active in the region. Hence, landslides, floods, earthquakes, snow avalanche, soil erosion etc. are common which is further intensified by the concentrated south Asian monsoonal process. In addition, more than 30 million people are living in the country. As most of the high mountain regions are not livable due to permanent snow, population are concentrated in marginal locations of hills and southern plains of the country. The dependency of the people in the limited resources has exposed them to disproportionate risk to natural disasters. The recent development pattern such as road construction and infrastructure development has added more risks. These crisscrossed mountains are hampered by such processes. As a result, the landslide is the deadliest disaster in terms of natural hazard mortality while people often consider that earthquake and floods are notorious. The natural process and exposure of the societies to the natural process make the Nepal one of the vulnerable countries in the world.

A rural house destroyed by April 25, 2015 Earthquake

Short-term and long-term physical, environmental, and economic impacts of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake of magnitude 9.0 hit the northeast coastal areas of Japan. This earthquake, commonly called as Tohoku earthquake, generated massive tsunami wave resulting coastal inundation in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima Prefectures, and most importantly, nuclear meltdown of Fukushima nuclear plant. Hence, this triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear) killed so many people. As of August 10, 2015, 15, 892 people are killed, 6,152 people are injured and 2,573 people are still missing¹. About 124,664 buildings were completely devastated whereas 274,641 buildings were partially collapsed having significant impacts on other infrastructures as well. This disaster damaged 116 bridges, 4,198 section of roads, 29 segments of railways and induced 207 landslides in the affected region.

The striking difference of this earthquake is the nuclear power plant crisis. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1984, this event created heated debates about the dependency of energy supply on nuclear power. Also, concerns were raised worldwide regarding the safety standards to combat such mega events. Krausmann and Cruz (2013)² studied the impacts of earthquake and tsunami on chemical industry where they concluded that this event dramatically highlighted the vulnerability to natural hazard triggered technological (Natech) accidents of a well prepared countries like Japan and suggested to revisit the current practices and policies to safeguard surroundings from such facilities. The same report highlights the disproportionate impact of chemical industries in the different location within the affected region. For instance, no lives were lost in Chiba industrial complex while four people were killed in Sendai refinery.

Role of social media during Seti Flood 2012 Nepal

Nepal is highly prone to natural hazards like Earthquake, Floods, Landslides, and Glacial Lake Outbursts Flood (GLOF). Every year flood creates havoc during the monsoon period as it accounts for two-third of the total precipitation in the country. The rivers originating from the high Himalayan region are the perennial source of water for the downstream people. Due to high relief and unstable slopes these rivers carry high sediment loads and volume causing flooding downstream. People in the mid hills and southern parts of the country face floods every year and have been a routine for coping with them. Loss of agricultural land, destruction of the highway for a month and temporary water logging are some of the common examples reported in the media.

Available global funds to climate change adaptation programme for the benefit of poor people

Introduction
Climate change is making poor people more vulnerable and marginalised in developing countries despite the fact that they have very little responsibility for causing climate change. Developed countries, with less than 20% of the world’s population, are responsible for 75% of global emissions (UNFCCC 2009 cited in Nakhooda et al. 2011, p. 1). Therefore there is growing consensus to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries, and in the meantime, to support poor countries by providing finance for climate change adaptation programme (Oxfam 2007, p. 2). Climate finance is defined as financial resources for tackling climate change while delivering sustainable development (Doig 2009, p. 1). Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), developed countries commit to help developing countries in meeting costs of adaptation programmes to combat climate change. Hence, global funding mechanisms under UNFCCC, Kyoto protocol, and bilateral and multilateral donors have been established to fulfil growing demand to support this program since 1992. 

 

Different studies have estimated different amounts required for the adaptation programme which is quite higher than the committed by the developed nations. For example, World Development Report (2010) has estimated USD 30 - 100 billion per year is required to adapt climate change (see Table 1).  This fund must not come from the 0.7% target of UN development assistance, and should cover the extra costs of responding to climate change in as usual scenario. I will argue that the pledged fund is not sufficient for the climate change adaptation programme in order to address the need of developing countries, it should be additional to development assistance, and direct access to funding resources should be provided to developing countries to make funds efficient. I will analyse in this paper i) how much global funds under different mechanisms are available and what are the shortfalls, and ii) does direct access to these funds make them efficient and benefit to developing nations?