Disaster Risk Reduction
Pakistan is a land of great topographic and climatic contrasts. It is one of the disaster prone countries of South Asia and every year it has to suffer huge loss of property and people generally as a result of disasters. Frequent occurrence of floods cause severe damages and disasters alongside landslides and infrequent earthquakes. Pakistan is one of the five countries with the highest annual average number of people who are exposed to floods which occur mostly due to storm system that originate from Bay of Bengal during monsoon season. In 2013, flood targeted 1 million acre of cropland in Pakistan’s Punjab, Gilgit Baltistan and AJK which affected approximately 2.5 million people and 367 people were killed. Earthquakes and floods had greatly affected masses of most vulnerable areas and almost 1, 61,449 people had lost their lives from 1900 to 2014 in these disasters. According to experts, Pakistan has suffered greatly due to floods in its 66 years history because of the absence of disaster risk management. Government of Pakistan involves various stakeholders and overseas to deal with the disasters on massive scale and to mitigate the hazards caused due to natural calamities of various kinds.
CHC believes that the local communities unless not trained on disaster preparedness are not responsive to reduce disaster risk and causalities resulting from these disasters. To reduce the amount of loss suffered by the vulnerable groups, it is necessary to train them on DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) so that the effective coordination can be ensured during incident response. CHC emphasizes on the active participation of community in decision making at grass root level which can make a big difference in risk reduction.
Children are the most vulnerable group of communities in any disaster and these disasters have tragic consequences on school-children. The school-children will be sensitized to promote the culture of disaster safety in the schools. They will be identified with feasible safety solutions and the possible potential hazards caused by furniture and windows that could fall and cause injury to children.
