DISASTER MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

Over the years, due to climate change and different other environmental factors including geo-physical setting, Bangladesh has become one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. Every year natural disasters like floods, cyclone and storm surges, salinity intrusion, water logging, riverbank erosion, drought, etc hit Bangladesh and cause lots of sufferings to the people. Due to geographical position Chittagong division is more vulnerable to different natural disasters and water logging and land slide makes this situation more severe.

During any disaster Barnaly was always beside the people in the past. Barnaly believes only relief and rehabilitation can not reduce vulnerability of the people to disaster. Rather, if their capacity is increased they will be able to combat the disaster impacts easily. It was also observed that community owned disaster mitigation actions are cost effective and sustainable. Barnaly has made an effort to increase the community based capacity in disaster preparedness.

Objectives

  1. To measure the extent and severity of natural and man-made disasters and impact at different sectors.
  2. To make recommendations (on a short term, mid-term and long term basis) to manage disasters.
  3. To assist development of technical, institutional and financial strategies and policy to manage disasters.

Activities

  1. Awareness raising.
  2. Capacity building and
  3. Implementation and demonstration.
  4. Research.

Completed Work Profile

  1. Risky zone identification of landslide prone areas of Chittagong City Corporation and
  2. Research Report on Landslide Vulnerability of Chittagong, Bangladesh. 

Building community capacity on disaster preparedness

It is recognized that if the community people are assisted to enhance their capacity through transferring knowledge, developing infrastructures and working jointly, they can combat disaster in a more sustainable manner. As a part of community capacity building Barnaly organized many workshops at the community level. Further, in aiming to develop a group of volunteers to assist the community people in any emergency, Barnaly imparted training to 50 youths in emergency response. The courses focused on basic understanding of disasters in Bangladesh, climate change and its impact, community based preparedness, people’s participation, survey and data collection techniques, emergency response, counseling and disaster cycle etc.