Abstract
Critical knowledge gaps seriously hinder efforts for building disaster resilience at all levels, especially in disaster-prone least developed countries. Information deficiency is most serious at local levels, especially in terms of spatial information on risk, resources, and capacities of communities. To tackle this challenge, we develop a general methodological approach that integrates community-based participatory mapping processes, one that has been widely used by governments and non-government organizations in the fields of natural resources management, disaster risk reduction and rural development, with emerging collaborative digital mapping techniques. We demonstrate the value and potential of this integrated participatory and collaborative mapping approach by conducting a pilot study in the flood-prone lower Karnali river basin in Western Nepal. The process engaged a wide range of stakeholders and non-stakeholder citizens to co-produce locally relevant geographic information on resources, capacities, and flood risks of selected communities. The new digital community maps are richer in content, more accurate, and easier to update and share than those produced by conventional Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (VCAs), a variant of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), that is widely used by various government and non-government organizations. We discuss how this integrated mapping approach may provide an effective link between coordinating and implementing local disaster risk reduction and resilience building interventions to designing and informing regional development plans, as well as its limitations in terms of technological barrier, map ownership, and empowerment potential.
Highlights
We aim to support local stakeholders to map pilot communities according to their needs in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment, and to compile and analyze community risk and capacity information to better assist stakeholders with their flood risk reduction and resilience building planning and implementation
We developed an integrated participatory and collaborative mapping methodology for the collection and management of local disaster risk information, and the available resources and capacity
A collection of tools was employed from participatory Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (VCAs) and collaborative mapping using the OSM platform
Summary
There is a strong need to transform the way disaster risk is managed on the ground so that disaster-prone communities can prosper despite the occurrence of hazards from time to time. This calls for a more integrated and pro-active perspective into the management of disaster risks to broader environmental and development planning across scales [6–10], and building disaster resilience of communities, so that they can “bounce forward” and resume social, ecological, and economic development after disaster events [7,11]. Building community disaster resilience requires evidence-based understanding of disaster risk on the ground, including all dimensions across vulnerability, exposure, and hazard [8], as well as communities’ capacities (such as in the form of human, social, physical, financial, and natural capitals) [12]
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