Disaster Risk in Central Asia: Socio-Economic Vulnerability Context and Pilot-Study of Multi-Risk Assessment in a Remote Mountain Area of Kyrgyz Republic

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.