Community participation in natural risk prevention: case histories from Colombia

Abstract

More than 75% of Colombia's 42 million people live in urban areas located in the mountains and are exposed to numerous natural hazards: floods, flash floods, landslides, earthquakes and volcanism. The Armero disaster of 1985 triggered the creation of the National System for Disaster Prevention and Relief. National, regional and local committees started to operate across the country, accompanied by education commissions that produced diverse audiovisual materials to help educate people living in these areas. The experiences of working with local committees gained during the last two decades are presented here. Case histories are from cities such as Pereira, Manizales and Medellín, where the local committees are run by people with little or no formal education but who understand that they must participate as a group to prevent or mitigate the effects of natural disasters. The co-operation between technical experts and trained residents represents an outstanding example of good communication and co-operation for urban populations living in dangerous areas. Although many problems have yet to be resolved, these case histories show that this type of organization seems to be more effective than direct intervention from national government agencies. The models of community participation and communication developed and refined here may have application to similar social environments in other countries.

Landslide resilience in Equatorial Africa: Moving beyond problem identification!

“…This observation is in line with landslide research performed in other landslide-prone developing regions, e.g. Malaysia (Motoyama andAbdullah, 2013), St. Lucia (Anderson et al, 2007) and Colombia (Hermelin and Bedoya, 2008). LS can have significant impacts, even if they do not lead to disasters with large numbers of casualties.…”

Landslide risk reduction measures: A review of practices and challenges for the tropics

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“…At the same time, the recurrent and unremitting nature of chronically occurring hazards presents an unparalleled opportunity for community-level experimentation and learning (Hermelin and Bedoya, 2008;Lacasse and Nadim, 2009). Contrary to acute landslides which tend to result in largescale resettlement schemes (Vlaeminck et al, 2016), populations exposed to chronic landslide hazard often continue living in the risk zones and applying a range of mitigation and adaptation strategies (Glade and Crozier, 2005;Gentle and Maraseni, 2012;Sudmeier-Rieux et al, 2012;Vaciago, 2013).…”