Day 57 – Q 5.Examine the significance of situational awareness in mitigating disasters. Take suitable examples.
5. Examine the significance of situational awareness in mitigating disasters. Take suitable examples.
आपदाओं को कम करने में स्थितिगत जागरूकता के महत्व की जांच करें। उपयुक्त उदाहरण लें।
Approach:
- Introduction
- Significance of situational awareness in mitigating disasters- Add examples including global as well as regional ones.
- Challenges
- Way out
- Conclusion
Introduction:
“Information is power” and it is a catalyst to sustainable development. The role of information and communication in emergency situations and can play important role at different levels based on different needs.
Role of information:
- Incorrect or unreliable information while forecasting the disaster can often result in great damage. In October 1999, coastal regions of Orissa state in India were hit by a killer cyclone, taking thousands of lives and leaving millions shelterless. Relying on their previous experience of “unreliable” news forecasting of imminent cyclones, most of the families did not realize the seriousness of the situation. The lack of responsive action resulted in deaths, which could have been avoided.
- Correct guidance can prepare the community to face an unavoidable natural disaster by providing basic information on Do’s and Don’ts.
- Designing appropriate relief and mitigation projects for natural disasters requires a solid understanding of the magnitude, geographical distribution and frequency of these hazards.
- The reconstruction phase is considered as a second chance to start afresh with something more “reliable”. A lack of information at this stage can have a strong dampening effect on rehabilitation activities.
Challenges:
- The barrier is the mindset of people, where the importance of documentation and information sharing is not considered as important.
- Lack of stable communication infrastructure.
- The role of information and communications technologies (ICT’s) to respond to the needs of affected community is still not very clear.
Way out:
- The most effective information dissemination system is community based participatory approach where technical know-how is provided through training to enhance internal capacity of community and local NGO’s of the region. The information and knowledge thus provided enters the system and stays effective in the long run.
- The medium of information transfer is more important as the credibility of any information depends on its source and medium of delivery. Even if information is made accessible to the needy, it is not always necessarily useful or reliable! Facts have to be understood completely and correctly for its elevation from “information” to “knowledge”.
Conclusion:
Information is not an end in itself, but a tool to assist the community to organize themselves in the hour of emergency. Despite recent advances in using ICT for disaster response and humanitarian assistance, many desirable solutions do not yet exist. More solutions need to be developed to help organizations create and manage response resources and infrastructure between disasters.
Best answer: Diwakar
