Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction
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This document discusses ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction. It begins by defining key terms like ecosystem, ecosystem services, disasters, hazards, vulnerability, exposure, risk, and resilience. It then introduces disaster risk reduction and ecosystem-based DRR, providing examples like river bank protection, wetlands protection, fire buffers, and erosion control. The take-home message is that healthy ecosystems can help reduce disasters.
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Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction
- 1. Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction Deepa Pullanikkatil (PhD) Co-Director: Sustainable Futures in Africa Eswatini Webinar for Sri Krishna College of Engineering, Coimbatore, India 21 Apr 2020
- 2. Outline 1. What is an “Ecosystem”? 2. What are Ecosystem Services? 3. What is a Disaster? (Hazard, Vulnerability, Exposure, Risk) 4. What is Resilience? 5. What is Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)? 6. Introduction to Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction 7. Some examples
- 3. What is an “Ecosystem”? • An ecosystem is a large community of living organisms (biotic: plants, animals and microbes) and non-living/physical things (abiotic) in a particular area. • The living and physical components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. • Ecosystems are of any size, you can define the boundary of an ecosystem.
- 4. What are Ecosystem Services? Previously we had four categories:
- 6. What is a Disaster? • A disaster is a sudden, calamitous event • That seriously disrupts the functioning of a community or society • Causes human, material, and economic or environmental losses that exceed the community's or society's ability to cope using its own resources. • Though often caused by nature, disasters can have human origins.
- 7. What is Hazard? • Definition of hazard of the UN-DRR as “A dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage. This event has a probability of occurrence within a specified period of time and within a given area, and has a given intensity.”
- 12. Exposure The situation of people, infrastructure, housing, production capacities and other tangible human assets located in hazard-prone areas The more the people, assets in hazard prone areas- the greater the Exposure
- 13. Risk?
- 16. Resilience The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties
- 18. Ecosystem Based DRR • Protection, conservation, restoration and sustainable use of Ecosystems Services • In order for them to provide protection to communities to reduce their risks to Hazard to Disasters • Ecosystem services can act as protective barriers against direct impacts of disasters • They can contribute towards longer term resilience of the communities
- 20. Dublin
- 21. • Images
- 22. Some examples of Ecosystem Based DRR activities 1. To prepare drought and flood risk management plans in the selected river basins to incorporate nature-based solutions such as wetland management 2. To rehabilitate eroded areas through nature- based interventions including grazing land management, and tree planting in gullies 3. To promote ecosystem management practices such as integrated water resource management for improving river stability, water provisioning and flood and drought risk reduction
- 23. Some examples • River bank protection • Wetlands protection • Fire buffers • Erosion control
- 27. Take home message Healthy ecosystems – less disasters Interested in DRR? Check out Sendai Framework
- 28. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, welcome to this webinar on Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction. For those of you who have the presentations, please open it and proceed along with me as I take you through this topic.
- In the next slide you will find the outline of the presentation. I will cover the definitions of Ecosystems, Ecosystem Services, Disaster, Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction before explaining about Ecosystem Based DRR. I will use the short form of Disaster Risk Reduction which is DRR in the presentation. This webinar will also explain some examples of disasters and how ecosystem based DRR can be useful.
- So moving on to the next slide- the first defining is that of Ecosystem. What is an ecosystem? It is an area where both living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) things are found and connected through energy flows and nutrient cycles. So you can have a River Basin or a mountain range or any area of land that you demarcate and define as ecosystem. All the plants, animals, insects, buildings, rivers, streams etc. that are contained within that boundary forms that particular ecosystem. You can define how big or small your ecosystem boundary can be. So it can be as large as the Hindu Kush mountain range, to the Kaveri River Basin to as small as an area in your district where agriculture and human settlements as well as natural spaces are present.
- Next we will talk about Ecosystem services. Ecosystem Services are the benefits that humans derive from ecosystems. As you can see from this slide, this used to be the previous definition of ecosystem services. They used to be classified into four categories. I prefer this to the newer definition that keeps it generic and puts everything into one category. In this older definition, there are Provisioning, Regulating, cultural and supporting ecosystem services categories. Provisioning ecosystem services are all the products/materials that you get from nature such as fruits, wild vegetables, water, timber, wood, herbs, minerals, stone for construction etc. Regulating services are the services provided by nature that regulate our environment. Regulating services include pollination, decomposition, water purification (forested areas, soils and rocks and wetlands help purify water), erosion and flood control (also by forests and wetlands), and carbon storage and climate regulation. You may have noticed where there are forests or even small areas where there are trees, the micro climate is cooler that surrounding areas. Next is “Cultural Ecosystem Services”. The non-material benefits people obtain from ecosystems are called 'cultural services'. They include aesthetic inspiration, cultural identity, sense of home, and spiritual experience related to the natural environment. Typically, opportunities for tourism and for recreation are also considered within the group. Finally we have the “Supporting ecosystem services”. Ecosystem services that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services. Some examples include biomass production, soil formation and retention, nutrient cycling, water cycling, and provisioning of habitat.
- Now in the new definition- they put everything together and call ecosystem services “nature’s benefits to humans”. All the benefits. In THIS slide you will find this diagram, like a wheel, which provides all those services we discussed under the four categories. The inner core of the wheel has the new definition – which is all the services that humans derive from nature are put together as ecosystem services. You will find all the benefits listed out on the sides of the wheel. So, in a nutshell the definition is - all benefits humans derive from nature.
- Next, lets move on to the definition of “Disaster”. What is a Disaster? It is a shock, a calamity, a sudden occurrence which affects society beyond its ability to cope with it There are natural and man made disasters. But to fully understand disasters, there are some other words we need to look at. Hazard, vulnerability, risk, exposure.
- A hazard is any source of potential damage, Potential harm or adverse effects on something or someone. So it is not yet a disaster, but it is a danger, OR dangerous phenomenon. For example, degraded hill sides are a hazard, but when the hill has a “land slide” and all the soil and rocks fall on the town situated on the foot of the hill, destroying property and affecting lives beyond the coping capacity of the town, then THAT HAZARD it becomes a disaster. So how do we measure Hazard. There are many ways, using numbers and collecting descriptive information and then converting into a number. For example, some environmental agencies Uses a scale of low hazard (1) to an extreme hazard (5). With a definition of the ranks. EARTHQUAKES Above 8 on the Richter scale causes massive damage, so it could be classified ad Hazard 5 FOR EXAMPLE. You can use several indicators to measure and rank hazards. .
- More recently, we have seen climate hazards in the news. Heavy rainfall in a hazard, but when the heavy rain causes a large flood and affects a city, its transport, infrastructure, lives of people, it becomes a disaster. Droughts are a hazard, but when it affects food production and people are without food, or cattle are dying without water etc. it has the potential to become a disaster. Sea level rise due to climate change is a hazard, but when it floods coastal cities beyond coping capacity, it becomes a disaster. Climatic hazards are agents of disaster in terms of what they may do to human settlements or to the environment.
- This map shows the global drought hazard distribution, the red areas indicate high drought exposure
- Hazard refers to a source of potential harm or danger, while risk refers to possibility that harm or injury might occur when exposed to hazard, WHICH CAN BECOME A disaster if risk is not minimized.
- Next lets look at Vulnerability. Vulnerability in this context can be defined as the diminished capacity of an individual or group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural or man-made hazard. So if humans, or a city or a country doesn’t have the capacity to cope with and recover from hazards, then they are considered “vulnerable”. The concept is relative and dynamic. Vulnerability is most often associated with poverty, but it can also arise when people are isolated, insecure and defenceless in the face of risk, shock or stress. Vulnerability is measured suing multiple indicators. There are many types of vulnerabilities- physical, social, economic, attitudinal, environmental. There is something called a “Multidimensional Vulnerability Index”. It can include access to insurance, poverty levels, income diversification, dependence on something imported such as energy or fuel, if its imported from another country, you are more vulnerable that in you are producing your own fuel or energy, any other dependencies – external financing, etc. You can select the criteria, provide weights for each criteria and using multi criteria analysis come up with a figure for vulnerability. An index.
- Exposure: So a highly densely populated city has higher exposure than a sparsely populated spread our sub-urban area. If a disaster strikes, the highly populated city will have more damages than the sub-urban areas. How do you measure it? Measures of exposure can include the number of people or types of assets in an area. It can also be the “value” of the asset. A degraded uninhabited land has less exposure than a highly dense upmarket settlement. Some of the methods include using methods that use predominantly statistical data gathered from published sources, and approaches which involve surveying local populations. Some data could be sources from national studies, censuses, remote sensing, using drones and other research studies. Then using statistical methods agreed upon, one can come up with an indicator for “exposure”. I would imagine municipalities and disaster management agencies would be very interested to measure exposure so that they come up with zoing regulations and risk reduction plans.
- Next- What is Risk? Risk is the chance or probability that a person will be harmed or experience an adverse effect if exposed to a hazard. An old tree, a large old tree in the city center could be a risk, AS IT IS OLD, SO ITS PROBABILITY OF FALLING DOWN IS HIGH. And because it is in a city, someone is likely to get harmed, or a car parked below it may get damaged. Similarly, an old building, can collapse, then it becomes a risk. Risk is defined as the probability of harmful consequences, or expected losses (deaths, injuries, property, livelihoods, economic activity disrupted or environment damaged) resulting from interactions between natural or human-induced hazards and vulnerable conditions (UN-ISDR, 2009, EC, 2011).
- So how do you measure risk- It is the product of Hazard, Exposure and Vulnerability. Datasets such as return period hazard maps are a useful tool in deriving a disaster risk metric. These datasets can be produced for different perils, such as earthquake or flood, on a country or regional basis. By using these maps in conjunction with exposure and vulnerability data, it is possible to derive a risk metric for measuring disaster risk reduction. This process can be refined if multiple return period hazard maps are used for the same peril region. For example, having 20-year, 50-year and 100-year hazard maps would give greater insight into the losses because catastrophes have a range of likelihoods of occurrence. For more complex and comprehensive analyses, probabilistic catastrophe models can be used where available, which assess tens of thousands of possible catastrophic events. By analyzing the exposure, hazard and vulnerability for each of these simulated events, catastrophe models can estimate the expected loss per year (or average annual loss).
- In a nutshell, risk is the intersection of hazard, vulnerability and exposure.
- Quite simply: Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. A simple idea of how a farmer could build resilience – suppose a farmer is farming crops- his land gets slow flooding, or waterlogging regularly, water level gently rising every year during rainy season. This happens may times, he loses his crops – maybe they are crops that cannot survive waterlogging. Then he decides to set up a duck farm on stilts. When his land floods again, the ducks simply swim around or stay in thei shelters which are on stilts- so flood water can simply run across without affecting the shelters. That is resilience, the farmer does not have any losses from the waterlogging, he is able to bounce back quickly from the flood episode without incurring losses. Resilience needs to be looked at from individual to groups to districts to states to national scales. Resilience is also clearly influenced by multiple factors, making precise measurement very difficult. This also needs a strategy of combining various factors, using appropriate weights, into a composite index. Again, multicriteria decision making is useful here. You decide on the indicators that contribute towards resilience – flood control infrastructure available in city, income levels of city dwellers, you can gather specific information from questionnaire surveys etc. The using multi criteria analysis come up with a figure. In the context of climate change, resilience has a particular meaning that overlaps significantly with adaptation, to the point that it is often used as a synonym or replacement for adaptation, while it is often used in place of vulnerability reduction in the disaster risk reduction context.
- We covered the different definitions- Hazard, Vulnerability, Exposure, risk and resilience. Next lets look at Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is a systematic approach to identifying, assessing and reducing the risks of disaster. It aims to reduce socio-economic vulnerabilities to disaster as well as dealing with the environmental and other hazards that trigger them. It includes risk analysis, preparedness, early warning, emergency relief and reconstruction. So there is both disaster preparedness and disaster management aspects to DRR.
- So we looked at Ecosystem Services and Disaster Risk reduction Now, what is Ecosystem Based DRR? It is USING ecosystem services to reduce our risks to disasters. Ecosystem service such as the flood control service of wetland can help us reduce flood disaster in a lace. If all you wetlands are covered with buildings, the water will have no place to seep down to the ground, and you will experience flooding. So maintaining wetlands functions, protecting wetlands and its ecosystem services, helps in disaster risk reduction of floods. Similarly, protecting forests and vegetation in mountains and hills, reduced risk of land slides. So the forest and trees on the mountains will act as protective barrier, when soil movement occurs, they will hold the soil together, preventing erosion and land slides.
- This is a flash flood in Zimbabwe which has damaged the road. Flash flood occurs when the catchment areas are degraded, devoid of trees, so heavy rains updtream in the catchment can cause heavy ruonoff of water and cause flash floods in other parts, affecting infrastructure. That’s why its important to take a larger ecosystem or landscape approach, where you preserve upstream areas with afforestation and good land management so downstream areas don’t get flooded.
- This is an image from Dublin, Ireland. The road has failed from a storm. How can we use ecosystem services to reduce storm damage to imfrastructure? Protective trees as wind breaks perhaps? Again, the solutions need to be specific to the site.
- This is a heavy rain event, causing landslide, flash flood that split a road into two in Canada. Canada has quite good intact forests, but identifying where the hill slopes are weak, where erosion has occurred and protecting such areas with afforestation can be one way of using ecosystem service of soil retention by trees to prevent such damages in future. Similarly, if wetlands are preserved, they slow down the flow of water during heavy rainfall episodes.
- Sustainable Land Administration Management (SLAM) Lower Usutu Sustainable Land Management (LUSLM) Eswatini National Trust Commission (ENTC) project on Strengthening National Protected Areas Systems (SNPAS),
- Eco-DRR in the Koh-e Baba Mountains of the Province of Bamyan, Afghanistan. The project undertook practical field interventions, including community tree nurseries and stabilizing streambanks and degraded slopes through re-planting activities This slide shows one of the achievements of the project which is planting of trees in hazard prone areas – over 200,000 trees planted. Community meetings were held to map the areas and identify hazard areas according to the community. The white map on the wall was drawn by the community and they chose sites which needed rehabilitation.
- On the left is countour map where community members identified hotpsots of flooding and avalanches. They were transferred to GIS maps and areas of rehabilitation localted.
- Lastly, let me give you a classic example of eco DRR in coastal areas, by planting and restoring mangroves which are natural coastal flood control measures and a buffer against tides. It is a free ecosystem services that mangroves provide, which expensive engineering structures such as sea walls can do. So these were some of the ecosystem services that we need to protect so that nature can provide us with disaster risk reduction benefits.
- Healthy ecosystems transla te to less disasters. For those of you who are interested to learn more about DRR, the global framework on this is called the Sendai Framework. Sendai I believe is a place in Japan where the UN developed this framework, which speaks specifically on DRR. I would encourage you to check that out. With that, I come to the end of this webinar. Thank you!
- So with that I come to an end to this webinar, I leave you with a picture of Eswatini, the mountain Kingdom. Thank you and have a great day!