Risk Reduction- Not Just Earthquake

Help with flying to Padang our team in response to the earthquake, aerial photography, shows that earthquakes are not the only problem with people, now or in the future to provide for the operation.

The landscape is a beauty that is the opposite of the disaster - but the warning signs of a complete reading. The flight along the coast of the city before the circles at home and make our final approach for landing on steep hills, shows telltale signs.

Find the city on a vast plain just above sea level. Two occupational hazards. If a future tsunami, as we have seen in landscapes like Aceh and Sri Lanka, the water would go a long way inland. Coastal protection is minimal. Ironically, where stone and some projections of concrete in the sea as a huge parallel ridge to join the coast, there are no mangroves behind them - just stay home. Other areas of mangroves to see if they give better protection behind them.

Anyway, even if true temperate climate model projections, rising sea levels threaten the city. With the added risk of more frequent and probably more intense storms, Padang has a lot to protect themselves.

Deforestation and unsustainable farming contributed landslides caused by earthquake, which killed hundreds of people. The wheels of the plane around to us in the hills before descending to the ground. We are analyzing landslides reported in the briefing of the UN, and now in the media. It shows how weak tremors might work. Large areas of forest have been felled by the human hand, weakened slopes of the terrain and make the world more sensitive, shifting cultivation, increased the chance of a hill set income.

Under normal circumstances, which have a dangerous subject, there are regular reports of houses washed away, many by landslides after heavy rains slain. The government had already tried a program of financial incentives for the highland people to improve farming practices to run. These are the types of landscapes that climate change is still fragile. Add earthquakes inevitable, as they belt along ALPID dangerous, which is the second most seismic regions in the world with 17 percent of the largest earthquakes in the world to sit and disasters occur.

This does not mean people are helpless. What we need is a disaster to reduce the risk that current and future risks to it and puts it in the context of vulnerability and human activity. Mercy Corps is preparing a strategy for the promotion and integration of the rehabilitation of the earthquake, protect economic stability and sustainable measures for disaster preparedness in these areas.

The indicator of success is how we help communities in the next major disaster, when a spontaneous acute event like an earthquake or a long challenges and chronic conditions such as rising sea levels. Or - as difficult and probably still is - a combination of both.