Strengthening Empowerment

9. Community Resilence
Improving community resilience to natural disasters

Coastal areas and communities have always been vulnerable to episodic and acute events such as cyclones, storm surges and other catastrophes. In addition to acute events, there are long-term chronic impacts such as erosion, sea level rise, land subsidence and pollution. The tsunami emphasised how ill-prepared the region was to deal with these events, and how low resilience exacerbate the impact of such disasters.Natural disasters affect groups in society differently. For example when the December, 2004 Tsunami hit, many people could not access assistance simply because of their gender, ethnicity, age, class, religion or occupation.

Women were particularly hit hard, but played a crucial role in the reconstruction phase and in disaster risk reduction efforts. However, the recovery process provided an opportunity to address underlying social disparities in the region, strengthen human rights protection for marginalized groups and creating an environment for social participation. Community capacity to respond to early warning systems was improved and disaster awareness programmes have been included in school curricula.

Coastal communities need to be able to adapt to the changes which will require building both the resilience of communities themselves, and of the ecosystems and natural resources upon which they depend. MFF places great emphasis on ecosystems and natural barriers as oppose to conventional “hard” engineering solutions, a well as actions to build community preparedness and to integrate risk reduction into ecosystem management into development planning. Great emphasis was also given to the need to develop and implement post-disaster strategies that focus on community livelihood recovery, while minimising damage to the ecosystems that are essential for coastal protection and livelihood security.

MFF encourages and promotes the following actions:

1. Further application of vulnerability assessment and mapping in coastal areas, including integrating livelihood and ecosystem information into existing databases and associated disaster preparedness and response strategies.
   
   
2. Continuation and incorporation of additional countries into the coastal community resilience component of the USAID IOTWS, including replicating activities in other villages, and extending methodologies for assessing community vulnerability, with particular attention to the most vulnerable groups including women and children.
   
   
3. Support for activities to strengthen coastal shelter belts and green belts where they are clearly needed and have been proved to make a demonstrable contribution to the protection of coastal communities and settlements, using environmentally-sound techniques.

The actions carried out under this programme of work contribute towards the following MFF results: More integrated development and conservation actions, which serve to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience among coastal communities. Improved participation in support for, and benefit from, ecosystem conservation among coastal dwellers, especially women.