Exploring community resilience and early warning solution for flash floods, debris flow and landslides in conflict prone villages of Badakhshan, Afghanistan

Abstract

There is a visible paradigm shift in disaster research from hazard and vulnerability assessment to developing framework for community resilience. Further, there is growing recognization in disaster science to develop framework to build resilience of the communities prone to natural hazards as highlighted by Sendai Framework for DRR 2015–2030. Again, community resilience especially early warning solution for Flash Floods, Debris flow and Land-slides in mountainous region of Afghanistan has escaped investigation and analysis. The objective of this paper is to explore the framework of existing monitoring/early warning systems (EWS) for landslides, mudslides and flood in selected villages/districts of district Badakhshan province. The framework is based on household questionnaire survey among 144respondents selected through purposive sampling method. The Climate-related Disaster Community Resilience Framework (CDCRF) revealed that there diminishing resilience culture among the communities in conflict prone area of Badakhshan Mountain. However, despite their exposure to the climate induced extreme events, the community has not been able to develop their coping capacity. It has also been observer that the primary reason for diminishing resilience culture among communities, lack of public accesses to science based information, degradation of indigenous knowledge on hazard, gendered livelihood transformation and limited adaptive capacity. The paper has proposed a new framework of Early Warning Solution for Flash Floods, Debris flow and Land-slides, which has wider implication for disaster management and emergency planning in the mountains of conflict prone area of Afghanistan.