This blog is the fourth of the health in urban development blog series. View also:

Treat, contain, repeat: key links between water supply, sanitation and urban health
By Pascale Hofmann

Health in secondary urban centres: Insights from Karonga, Malawi
By Don Brown

Gaza: Cage Politics, Violence and Health
By Haim Yacobi

 

If you are interested in DPU’s new MSc in Health in Urban Development, more information can be found on our website.

 

Over the last few years there have been several initiatives to develop practical and policy-relevant ways to measure environmental risks faced by low-income groups. This has been in response to a severe lack of information about disaster and health risks available for policy makers to draw on in most low- and middle-income nations. There is a need for both detailed settlement-level data, particularly for informal settlements, as well as for aggregated data needed to inform city-level or national interventions[i]. In this blog, I discuss innovative methodologies that are being developed in cities of the Global South to generate much needed data for action.

Innovative methodologies for understanding health and disaster risks at the urban scale

Innovative methods developed for understanding and measuring these risks range from profiling and mapping informal settlements with community-led or co-production approaches, to detailed analysis of hospital, police and newspaper records. Other methods seek to build consensus based on perceptions and experiences of risk with communities and local governments. DesInventar is a collection of national, regional and city-level databases, which use newspaper reports, as well as police, hospital and accident records to create a detailed portrait of both large or intensive disasters and small-scale extensive disaster events. Other methodologies such as Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) settlement profiling and Action at the Frontline use community-generated information about resident’s experiences of health and disaster risks in order to enter into dialogue with municipal governments about their needs. ReMapRisk uses community-generated risk information and offers a spatial analysis with maps to interrogate and visualise the information, there are maps for Lima (Peru), Karonga (Malawi) and Freetown (Sierra Leone).  Other approaches, such CityRAP, The City Resilience Index and 10 Essentials for Making Cities Resilient focus on the municipal government’s perspectives of risks and capacities for addressing risk at the city-level, and often in dialogue with communities.

 

Health and disaster risks faced by the urban poor

These studies have found that women, men and children living in informal settlements are disproportionally exposed to small and large-scale disaster risks such as flooding, landslides and fires, as well as everyday risks, such as water borne illnesses and poor air quality. For example, the AXA-funded research I have been involved in in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, used Action at the Frontline methodology, with household surveys, focus groups and action planning Mtambani settlement in Ilala municipality and Bonde la Mpunga settlement in Kinondoni municipality[ii]. The communities identified crime, poor solid management, lack of storm-water drainage infrastructure, lack of wastewater and toilet infrastructure, lack of basic health services and hospitals, flooding, high living costs and drug abuse as the main issues in their settlements. Many of these are directly related to health problems, such as malaria, diarrheal disease and personal safety. While big disasters, such a major floods, earthquakes, tsunami and windstorms do affect the health and welfare of millions across the globe every year, it is actually the smaller events and everyday risks that impact the greatest number of people’s health and well-being.

 

These different methods of understanding risks have been employed in close partnerships between researchers, community organisations, municipal authorities and other research users in many cities across Asia, Africa and Latin America. While there are many innovative initiatives for understanding and measuring risks, the data still remains extremely patchy and limited in scope. Furthermore, and its uptake into municipal government operations and planning is not guaranteed.

 

Principles for the uptake of risk information in urban planning and policy making

Through the Urban Africa Risk Knowledge programme[iii], researchers have identified some principles related to the uptake of local-level risk information into planning and policy making: 1) It is important not just to provide the type of information that are assumed to be useful, but to work closely with partners in identifying data that will be useful for policy and practice[iv]. 2) The community-driven process can be more conducive to driving change in practice and policy in local government than expert-driven data. The use of local knowledge that comes through communities collaborating with local level decision-makers can capture the qualitative experiences of risks and measure the burdens arising from these risks, while enabling communities to engage with local governments/state about their needs[v]. 3) Small steps at collecting local data that are ‘good-enough’ can be valuable in the beginning.[vi] 4) Project-based risk measurement initiatives are rarely enough to make a difference in government practices and policies. What is required is long-term and sustained engagement with information that is regularly updated. 5) Improving official data collection, such as census, vital registration systems and healthcare records will be necessary to systematically address disaster and health risks in informal settlements[vii].

 

Many cities in low- and middle- income countries, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, do not have functioning local governments, they lack a metropolitan structure or their resources are too meagre to take on new initiatives. While some progress has been made in developing methodologies that help us to better understand the everyday and small-scale disaster risks that underpin women’s, men’s and children’s health in informal settlement, there is still much more to do to scale up these initiatives and to enable local governments to take actions to address risks.

 

References

[i] Satterthwaite, D and Sverdlik, A (2018). Assessing health risks in informal settlements in sub-Saharan African cities. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No. 10. June 2018. Available from: https://www.urbanark.org/assessing-health-risks-informal-settlements-sub-saharan-african-cities

[ii] Osuteye, E. at al. (2018). Communicating risk from the frontline: projecting community voices into disaster risk management policies across scales. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No. 19. October 2018. Available from:

[iii] See www.urbanark.org

[iv] Dodman, D., Leck, H. and F. Taylor (2017). Applying multiple methods to understand and address urban risk. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No. 7. July 2017. Available from: https://www.urbanark.org/applying-multiple-methods-understand-and-address-urban-risk

[v] Osuteye, E. at al. (2018). Communicating risk from the frontline: projecting community voices into disaster risk management policies across scales. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No. 19. October 2018. Available from: https://www.urbanark.org/communicating-risk-frontline-projecting-community-voices-disaster-risk-management-policies-across

[vi] Spaliviero, M. at al. (2019). Urban Resilience building in fast-growing African Cities. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No. 20, January 2019. Available from: https://www.urbanark.org/urban-resilience-building-fast-growing-african-cities

[vii][vii] Adelekan, I.O. and D. Satterthwaite (2019). Filling the data gaps on everyday and disaster risks in cities: The case of Ibadan. Urban Africa Risk Knowledge Briefing, No 22. January 2019. Available from: https://www.urbanark.org/filling-data-gaps-every-day-and-disaster-risks-cities-case-ibadan

Also by Ruchika Lall – Finding Spaces of Longitudinal Learning and Institutional Reflexivity

The global challenge of waste is irrefutable – it is visible, urgent and common to us all. Product-to-landfill life cycles make explicit how the global north and south are relational. Multinational corporations manufacture in regional hubs, for global markets, and transnational waste exports are offshored as recycled waste. Plastic debris floats from shore to shore.

On April 14^th 2017, an avoidable tragedy – a man-made disaster – took place, as a mountain of garbage collapsed in North Colombo, Sri Lanka. Over a hundred homes were buried in the debris, displacing over 600 families, and killing 31 persons living at the edge of Meethotamulla land fill. The abandoned paddy field had been receiving tonnes of municipal garbage every day for over 20 years – growing to the height of a six-storey building, with a footprint of almost 20 acres. Reports list several causes for the collapse: (1) The incremental unsettling of the mountain of waste caused by rains; (2) Decomposition releasing methane and toxic gases which combusted into fire; and (3) A lateral landslide triggered when the lowest layer of the wetland soil couldn’t take the weight of the waste any longer. While emergency services were brought in and the dumping of waste has been stalled – a mountain of waste is still visible at the landfill today. More concerning still, several similar land fill sites that exist in Colombo remain fully operational – a shocking sight, yet unsurprising, given the global crisis of waste.

Often, communities living in marginal lands are caught within this crisis Sri Lanka, informal settlements often emerge alongside wetlands, canals and beach fronts. Engaging with these communities, as a part of efforts to improve waste management initiatives is therefore crucial.

In October 2017, Sevanatha Urban Resource Centre started a community-led Municipal Waste Recycling Programme (MWRP) in Dehiwala and Mount Lavinia – a municipality adjacent to Colombo. MWRP is a transnational initiative designed to reduce plastic pollution of the oceans. Funded by USAID, the programme is active in the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. As an NGO positioned as an intermediary between the state and communities, Sevanatha’s aim for the programme is to facilitate building a responsive society in partnership with the local municipality to address the challenge of waste. It aims to raise awareness around waste separation, for recycling and reuse, and to build partnerships between the government, private sector and civil society. The project focuses on a few key approaches in parallel – research and analysis, conducting awareness raising programmes in communities and schools, enabling a network of waste collectors and recycling businesses, and prevention of waste disposal into canals and beach fronts. Unifying these approaches, and inspired by successful iterations in Thailand and Indonesia, Sevanatha aims to establish community waste banks[1] to promote a shift towards a circular economy. Across the municipality, Sevanatha has identified priority informal settlements in environmentally sensitive areas to work with – these are typically positioned along stretches of canals, wetlands, and the coastal belt.

Auburn Side, a coastal settlement, and a part of the MWRP area, is one such example. Auburn Side is split into two ‘sides’ by a coastal railway line that runs parallel along Sri Lanka’s South Western Coast. These are the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’, separated as the ‘beach side’ and ‘land side’. While several residents of the ‘beach side’ qualify for state-built apartments in another part the city, they choose to live along the coast to continue their daily livelihood as a part of generational fishing communities. The informal categorisation of the settlement however affects the level of municipal services that the ‘beach side’ receives. While the municipality waste collection trucks serve the ‘land side’, they do not cross the railway line onto the ‘beach side’. Further, a storm water drain from the city regularly discharges plastic waste from the formal city into the informal settlement, before it spills out further into the ocean.

Given that waste as an issue bridges the formal and the informal – through urban lifestyles, production, consumption and disposal patterns – How can waste management projects that engage with informality, such as Sevanatha’s MWRP, leverage waste as an entry point for ‘scaling up’? I use the term ‘scaling up’ in the context of the search for scale within housing policy, through programmes that strategically engage with informality with ‘multi-dimensional, multisectoral and multi-scalar’ ambitions[2]. This is especially relevant to Sri Lanka, where decades of policy and programmes such as the Million Houses programme that engaged with in-situ upgrading, have been steadily replaced by programmes[3] that liberate land ‘occupied’ by informal settlements through ‘involuntary relocations’.

What would such an approach towards scaling up entail? I reflect on three approaches within waste management projects and three follow up questions, that could, in parallel, leverage waste as an entry point to scaling up –

1) Coproduction by building on existing on ground initiatives

2) Networks to share and platforms to cross-learn

3) Challenging assumptions and analysing parallel economies

 

1) Coproduction by building on existing on ground initiatives

An approach that uses waste as an entry point for scaling up would involve building on existing informal initiatives, making them visible and connecting them to larger institutional systems.

At Auburn Side, Sevanatha’s project team is familiar with a few supportive community members who are conscious of how closely their lives are dependent on the ocean. An elderly fisherman is an inspiration – recovering almost 25 plastic bottles from the ocean every day. His home – a living museum of our ‘legacy’ of waste – is decorated with his craft of upcycling these bottles as ornamental lampshades. Similarly, a resident who grew up in the settlement is a newly elected member of the municipality and wishes to set up a waste collection centre.

 

Can projects build on the actions and aspirations of such individuals within the community, to facilitate constructive institutional engagement?

 

Sevanatha’s strategy of incentivising separation of waste through establishing waste banks in partnership with the municipality, and operated by the community, is one opportunity to do so.

 

2) Networks to share and platforms to cross-learn

 

In order to pilot and iteratively develop the waste bank, Sevanatha’s team has, through trial and error, organised to focus on three settlements in the municipality – Badowita, Rathmalana, and Auburn Side.

This organisation provides the project team to iteratively learn from experiences in these three settlements, and to consciously inform approaches in the other. In Badowita, a waste collection centre owned by the municipality is operated by two women from the informal settlement along the polluted canal. While they collect waste from a formal settlement in the municipal area, they have also started to receive waste from their own community – for example, an enterprising woman in the informal settlement has started receiving waste from neighbours at her house, to deposit it at the waste collection centre. Similarly, post a beach cleaning programme in the informal settlement at Rathmalana, a few individual residents started collecting recyclable waste to send to the Badowita Waste Collection Centre, facilitated by Sevanatha. Sevanatha’s project team further hopes to use the experiences in Badowita and Rathmalana, to learn from and to further develop a suitable model of a waste bank at Auburn Side.

The iterative learnings and organisation of the project could further create opportunities for scaling up, when translated into facilitating networks between local champions from these three settlements, as well as municipal stakeholders – to create a network and platform to share cross learnings, that continues in the long term.

Further, how may stakeholders extend such networks of sharing, and platforms of cross learning, in other settlements, once fixed project periods finish?

3) Challenging assumptions and analysing parallel economies of waste 

The opportunity within waste management projects that engage with informality, such as Sevanatha’s MWRP, to leverage waste as an entry point for ‘scaling up’ – is to position informality in the context of the city. With such an approach, a ‘community waste bank’ is not just about recycling the waste of the informal settlement but is also about enabling opportunities for the settlement to negotiate with and link with the larger municipal area – as a means of scaling up. The challenges within these approaches are two-fold –

First – to read between the lines of assumptions and regulations. Much of the assumptions linked to illegality and drug use have proven to be a convenient narrative to disengage with informality and small-scale waste collectors. These assumptions have become stereotypes that make it easier to marginalise low-income settlements and their rights, to the extent that the current low income urban housing programmes in Sri Lanka have shifted towards involuntary relocation. Scaling up involves rethinking municipal regulations on land use, while also actively reaching out to minority or vulnerable communities that may be engaged in the informal trade of waste.

Secondly, while project interventions may push for coproduction, there do exist parallel economies of waste. For example, in North Colombo, an agglomeration of settlements exists in Wattala, within an informal economy of land reclamation. In a low-lying area prone to flooding, residents and informal landlords purchase construction waste to increase the level of the land before (and even annually, after) construction, while several houses are visibly sinking due to the settlement of the soil. Understanding and analysing these parallel economies of ‘informal’ land reclamation and markets is relevant – as they potentially compete with processes of coproduction that projects such as MWRP may wish to support, while trapping communities in cyclical poverty – often so, with the influence of individuals with access to institutional power.

Finally, how may interventions build a discourse that moves beyond assumptions or existing formal-informal collaborations of clientelism, to instead recognise the agency of communities?

_________________________________________________________________________

Ruchika Lall

Ruchika Lall participated in the third wave of the DPU/ACHR/CAN Young Professionals Programme. During her time in the programme, she was embedded with Sevanatha Urban Resource Centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Ruchika is also an alumna of the DPU’s MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) programme.

_________________________________________________________________________

Reference

Fiori, J., 2014. Informal City: Design as Political Engagement. In: T. Verebes, ed. Masterplanning the adaptive city: computational urbanism in the twenty first century. London: Routledge, pp. 40-47.

[1] Community Waste Banks exchange recyclable waste for incentives in cash or kind, to promote separation of waste and recycling at the household level.

[2] Scaling up seen “as not a quantitative process but a change in the quality of the city itself and in the nature of its political institutions; and as a political restructuring of urban institutionalities through synergies and contradictions across processes operating at multiple dimensions and scales, including social, economic and political” (Fiori, 2014)

 

[3] Urban Regeneration Programme of the Urban Development Authority, Sri Lanka

Research in the age of the falling attention span

There is undeniably a great amount of social science research produced around the world. In the field of development, much of it aims to inform the public, perhaps even with the expressive aim of changing behaviours. Yet how can one produce engaging content when it is well documented that the general public cannot focus for more than seconds at a time? There has been substantial research on people’s decreasing attention span. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman advanced his thesis that television and the emphasis placed on entertainment has altered the way people consume information, and decreased their ability to concentrate on issues they do not find pleasurable[i]. Nicholas Carr focused his study on the advent of the Internet, arguing that our use of the Internet not only makes absorption harder, it actually impacts our ability to be engrossed in written material both online and offline[ii][iii]. Statistics seem to concur with this thesis. A 2008 study found that Internet users spent 10 seconds or less on any given page over 50% of the time, while the average time for a stay on a page was placed between 2-3 seconds[iv]. A 2015 study by Microsoft found that overstimulation through the Internet and smartphones has decreased our attention span from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015, jokingly compared to the attention span of a goldfish[v].

 

The evidence is all around us: news videos online last on average under 3 minutes. In development, the trend is very much the same. Most organisations – including DFID, WaterAid and ODI to name a few – now produce a mix of short videos and infographics to present their material. Information is distilled in bite size pieces which audiences can easily digest.

 

Conversely, when people are engaged, they can focus for longer. And this is where things get interesting. Coming up with engaging ways to communicate information can make all the difference. And what better way to engage someone’s attention than turning the subject into a game? Playing games de facto retains the player’s attention, and, for that reason, they have long been used in education. Whether it was through educational board games or through the use of computer games in school for math or physics modules, most of us were exposed to learning in game format.

 

Games can therefore be a great communicative tool, especially for complex information. Openspace, the organisation I am currently working with in Bangkok, has teamed with Dr Wijitbusaba Ann Marome from the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Thammasat University, to translate the results of a 5-year international research project of the Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR) on urban resilience into a game.

 

Urban Resilience and the CCaR research

Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR): Building Adaptive Capacity for Managing Climate Change in Coastal Megacities is a research project financed by Canada, looking at climate change and urban resilience, with respect to flooding in Vancouver, Lagos, Manila and Bangkok. CCaR uses modelling through the VENSIM program, using data derived from City System Dynamic model, to input known variables and produce future scenarios for these cities. Interestingly, the causes of flooding are different in each city, which allows for a broad field of study.

 

Urban Resilience refers to the capacity of a city to bounce back after a shock. The most widespread definition, coined by the Community and Regional Research Initiative on Resilient Communities (CARRI), defines resilience as the “capability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multi-hazard threats with minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and national security”[vi]. As evidenced by this definition, urban resilience has adaptability and complexity at heart. It views cities as adaptive systems, where the interactions of a wide set of factors need to be taken into consideration. Moreover, preparedness is key to achieving urban resilience, as anticipating potential future threats to urban settings allows for greater adaptability. This becomes ever more significant given the looming threat of climate change, which already brings an increase in the occurrence and severity of extreme weather phenomena around the world. While urban resilience involves more than natural disasters, these are considered a central aspect of the threats that need to be countered.

 

In Bangkok, it is very intuitive to focus on flooding. Bangkok floods severely every couple of years, and, with climate change, the intensity is worsening. 2011 witnessed the worst flooding in decades; the year remains engraved in people’s minds and imagination, and routinely comes up in conversation as the benchmark for all subsequent flooding. The numbers are staggering: 884 people died, while a further 13.6 million were affected. 65 provinces were classified as disaster zones, and the World Bank estimated the total economic losses at $45.7 billion, making it one of the five most costly natural disasters in history[vii][viii].

 

To a lesser extent, Bangkok floods semi-regularly. For example, it only takes a heavy night’s worth of rain during the rainy season to flood Lat Prao, the area where I live. The CCaR research concludes that flooding in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR) will intensify as both the intensity and frequency of heavy rain will increase.

 

Perhaps surprisingly, the prevalence of flooding has not been linked to climate change or urban resilience, be it at policy level or in people’s minds. It is also telling that there is no government agency responsible for dealing with it. “It ranks low on the scale of political priorities, far behind questions of economic and social development” remarks Dr Marome, the leader of the CCaR team for Bangkok.

 

Dr Marome stresses the importance of preparing society. “While investing in infrastructure can be very useful, it can only ever represent 70% of dealing with climate change. The remaining 30% needs to be done by people themselves, through preparedness. Japan is a great example of that. The state provides different measures to mitigate earthquakes, from law and regulations to earthquake resistant structures, but society has also adapted. Children are being taught from a very young age how to prepare for earthquakes”.

 

 

In Bangkok, there is clearly a gap between the people who have the relevant information on the one side, and the wider public and government agencies on the other. The Urban Resilience Board Game tries to bridge this gap, by making information easily accessible to a wider public, beyond the scope of academics and people in the field.

 

The Urban Resilience Board Game

The game is played by 4 or 6 players, each the mayor of a Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR) – Bangkok Metropolis, Nakhon Pathom, Pathum Thani, Nonthaburi, Samut Prakan, and Samut Sakhon – and a facilitator. Each region has distinct characteristics and conditions, all based on the CCaR research findings: some are more developed, some have issues with waste management, some have issues with social cohesion, or environmental protection. Overall, there are six different urban futures, each affected by four different drivers: socio-economic factors, housing and land use, environment and health, and flood management.

 

All players are allocated an initial budget, to be used for future investments. The players roll the dice to advance on the board and get handed an event that they need to deal with. Events range from anything between a drug problem among the area’s youth to the construction of a fast train linking this area to its neighbours. The player needs to identify the risk, the opportunity, and, where necessary, invest to deal with the event. Points are allocated for correctly identifying each, and all need to be relevant to the specific area’s profile. This urges players to link different issues and eventually identify necessary investments in the short or long term.

 

Rolling a six or completing two rounds triggers a flood round. Flood intensity varies each time, and affects each region differently. An area’s resilience ultimately depends on preparedness stemming from investments in the previous rounds. For example, should an area have a serious garbage problem, investment in clean up prior to the flood round would increase resilience, as refuse not only obstructs drainage, thus worsening the flood, but also spreads diseases. During the flood round, all investment proposals need to be voted on by the mayors of the other regions: players need to argue their case to seek approval. The game ends when any participant reaches the end of the board; the player with the most points wins.

 

The Urban Resilience Board Game thus has a double role: first, it raises awareness about flooding and resilience, allowing people to think about urban resilience and find linkages between different issues. Second, it brings people from different backgrounds together and opens a dialogue that would not otherwise be happening, and certainly not under these conditions. In June 2016, Thammasat University and Openspace organised a workshop with academics, policy makers and representatives from the local government, specifically from the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA). Many participants had no experience with these issues but all played the board game for two hours. The feedback was extremely positive, as they found the game both informative and entertaining. Interestingly, the game seemed to transcend political red tape, allowing people to consider flooding and urban resilience without the backdrop of the sometimes charged political considerations that happen in Thailand.

The appeal for planners is evident. The game opens a platform for people to discuss complex issues in an informal way. Instead of being confined by the structure and convention of a meeting or conference, participants can let their guard down and engage with the material in a new way. More importantly, the subject matter becomes accessible to people with no prior experience. In the guise of explaining the rules and aim of the game, facilitators are actually presenting the basic information for people to understand the core ideas of urban resilience. Yet all of this remains unthreatening; at the end of the day, it is only a game. The players are then pushed to really think about the issues, and see the connection between investments in infrastructure and cooperation with other regions, and achieving urban resilience. Their output is then fed back to the CCaR team and Openspace, who collect the documented actions that players took during the flood round. This is crucial, as it allows for a feedback loop into the research in a very direct way.

 

In the next months, more workshops will be organised. Moreover, Dr Marome and Thammasat University plan to train members of the public to be facilitators, allowing for greater exposure, perhaps even spilling to other Thai cities in the North. They are also working on having a workshop with urban policy planners from across Asia to play the game. The possibilities are endless, because who would not like to come play with us?

 

[i] Postman, N. 2005 [1985]. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London: 2005 Penguin Books

[ii] Carr, N. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains”. The Atlantic. July-August 2008

[iii] Carr, N. 2010. The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. London: W. W. Norton & Company

[iv] Weinreich, H., Obendorf, H., Herder, E. and Mayer, M. 2008. “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use”. ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 2, No. 1

[v] Mcspadden, K. 2015. “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish”. The Times, May 2015. Retrieved in September 2016 from http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/

[vi] Wilbanks, T. 2007. The Research Component of the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI). Presentation at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado- Boulder; as quoted in C. E. Colten, R. W. Kates, and S. B. Laska. 2008. Community Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Retrieved in September 2015 from http://www.resilientus.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/FINAL_COLTEN_9-25-08_1223482263.pdf

[vii] Emergency Operation Center for Flood, Storm and Landslide. 2012. Flood, Storm and Landslide Situation Report. Retrieved in October 2016 from http://disaster.go.th/dpm/flood/flood54/news/news_thai/EOCReport17JAN.pdf [in Thai]

[viii] Impact Forecasting LLC. 2012. 2011 Thailand Floods: Event Recap Report. Retrieved in September 2016 from http://thoughtleadership.aonbenfield.com/Documents/20120314_impact_forecasting_thailand_flood_event_recap.pdf

 

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Nausica is a DPU MSc Environment and Sustainable Development alumna. She is currently completing the DPU/ACHR/CAN Young Professionals Programme in Bangkok, Thailand. All images taken by Nausica Castanas