Saturday, 11 October 2014 00:00
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SRI LANKA is at the mercy of weather gods these days. While parts of the country are drought stricken with their precious wildlife hunting for water, other regions are being threatened by landslides and blackouts after torrential rains. The sheer enormity of challenges posed by the weather could eventually haunt the country’s economy and already has made impact on most lives.
Natural hazards and flood events are a part of nature. They have always existed and will continue to exist. With the exception of some floods generated by dam failure or landslides, floods are climatological phenomena influenced by the geology, geo-morphology, relief, soil, and vegetation conditions. Meteorological and hydrological processes can be fast or slow and can produce flash floods or more predictable slow-developing floods, also called riverine floods.
Sri Lanka is a great example of how society has become more vulnerable to natural hazards. Although floods are natural phenomena, human activities and human interventions into the processes of nature, such as alterations in the drainage patterns from urbanisation, agricultural practices and deforestation, have considerably changed the situation in whole river basins. At the same time, exposition to risk and vulnerability in flood-prone area have been growing constantly.
The probability of flooding is expected to increase; the earth’s climate is changing rapidly. As far as possible, human interference into the processes of nature should be reversed, compensated and, in the future, prevented. It is necessary to promote and harmonise changes in water policies and land use practices, as well as environmental protection and nature conservation.
All appropriate action should be taken to create legal, administrative and economic frameworks that are stable and enabling and within which the public, private and voluntary sectors can each make their contribution to flood prevention, dam safety and the reduction of adverse impacts of dangerous flood events on human health and safety and valuable goods and property, and on the aquatic and terrestrial environment.
The impact of all major human activities concerning flood prevention and protection in the catchment area on society as a whole should be properly considered. All major undertakings with the potential of adversely affecting human health or significantly affecting water quality or quantity, biological communities, landscape, climatic factors, architectural and archaeological heritage, or the relationship between them should be subject to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and – if suitable e.g. because of the size or impact of the building activity – authorisation procedures.
Physical planning as well as urban and rural development and construction should take into account the requirements of flood prevention and reduction, including the provision of retention areas. The real development is to be surveyed by monitoring of urban settlement in areas that may seriously be affected by floods.
In setting up these frameworks, local problems, needs and knowledge and local decision-making mechanisms should be duly taken into consideration. Sri Lanka’s ad hoc top-down development decision making system means that an information policy that covers risk communication and facilitates public participation in decision-making is all but non-existent. It seems that the results are already here to stay.
