Abstract
The Kyrgyz Republic, as well as other countries of Central Asia, is highly exposed to natural-environmental hazards, which continues undermining efforts to achieve sustainable development. National disaster risk assessment procedures in Central Asian countries are mainly based on the evaluation of hazards without a detailed analysis of vulnerability and resilience. Additionally, the available practices of hazard assessments are mostly based on a zone-by-zone approach, which would make it difficult to develop a comparative assessment of facilities located in the same hazard zone. This situation hampers the efforts of the local governments to effectively plan and implement disaster risk reduction (DRR) actions when they cannot differentiate the individual facilities according to the risk level in order to focus the existing capacity (which is usually very limited) on increasing the resilience and reducing the vulnerability of the facilities with the highest risk. For improvement of DRR practices, the quantitative comprehensive approach of risk analysis applied in this study is used for risk assessment of educational institutions in one of the most seismically active and most disaster-prone mountain regions of Central Asia - the Alay valley, a wide intermontane valley situated in between the two biggest mountain systems in Asia: Tian Shan and Pamir. The developed multidisciplinary study suggests that the quantitative multi-risk assessment approach - can play a crucial role in understanding risks and can significantly improve the quality of disaster risk reduction planning.
Highlights
Central Asia1 (CA) is highly exposed to a variety of natural hazards, to earthquakes and weatherrelated events
The developed multi-risk assessment approach was approved by the decision of the Scientific and Technical Council of the Inter-Ministerial Commission for Civil Protection of the Kyrgyz Republic and was recommended to be adapted to the local and national system of disaster management [57]. This experience may contribute to the improvement of disaster risk management (DRM) practice in KR, which is still mainly based on old paradigm of disaster risk, where the risk concept is still considered equal to the concept of hazard (Disaster Risk ≈ Hazard) and this explains why most of the national DRM activities still focused on assessing separate hazards and, as usual, without a systematic consideration of vulnerabilities and resilience
The hazard in KR is still considered as the main causal factor of disaster and as a result, DRM actions are mainly directed towards disaster recovery and response and not so much towards disaster risk reduction and mitigation
Summary
Central Asia (CA) is highly exposed to a variety of natural hazards, to earthquakes and weatherrelated events. Along with the four other nations of CA, the Kyrgyz Republic (KR, or Kyrgyzstan) shows significant vulnerability to hazard because of the relatively low level of socio-economic development. Socio-economic setting When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, five countries emerged in CA: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, stretching from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to the Russian Federation in the north (see Fig. 1). These independent countries are classified as “landlocked developing countries with economies in transition” [13]. In the Kyrgyz Republic, there are no rich nature hydrocarbon resources, but thanks to its geographicgeological and climatic context, the country is rich in water, related hydroelectric potential and mineral resources [4]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
