chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)with semi-rural mountainous areas, Saijo City faces unique challenges in disaster riskreduction. First, Japan’s ageing population represents a particular problem. Young ablebodiedpeople are very important to community systems of mutual aid and emergencypreparedness. And as young people tend to move away to bigger cities, smaller towns inJapan have an even older population than the already imbalanced national average. Second,smaller cities like Saijo City are often spread over a mix of geographic terrains – anurban plain, semi-rural and isolated villages on hills and mountains, and a coastal area.To meet these challenges, the Saijo City government instigated in 2005 a risk-awarenessprogramme targeting schoolchildren. Focusing on the city’s various physical environments,the ‘mountain-watching’ and ‘town-watching’ project takes 12-year-olds, accompaniedby teachers, local residents, forest workers and municipal officials, on risk educationfield trips. The young urban dwellers meet with the elderly in the mountains tolearn together about the risks Saijo City faces and to remember the lessons learned ofthe 2004 typhoons. Meanwhile, a ‘mountain- and town-watching’ handbook has beendeveloped, and a teachers’ association for disaster education, a children’s disaster preventionclub and a disaster prevention forum, also for children, have been set up. The initiativeserves as an excellent example of a local government leading a multi-stakeholder andcommunity-based disaster risk awareness initiative that then becomes self-sustaining.Essential 8A rapidly growing municipality addresses the increasing riskof droughts by implementing a water resource managementprogrammeOverstrand, South Africa(From UNISDR, Local Governments and Disaster Risk Reduction – Good practices andlessons learned, Geneva, April 2010.)The Overstrand municipality, located along the coast of Western Cape Province inSouth Africa, has been faced with rapid and seasonal population growth and projectedshortages of water supply in the district of Hermanus. In addition, there has been adecline in rainfall since 1997 and climate change threatens to bring more variablerainfall and more extreme temperatures to the Western Cape region. In response, themunicipality adopted a comprehensive water resource management and developmentprogramme, which draws on the national policy and legislative platform developed bythe South African National Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.The municipality strived to implement a longer-term, multi-stakeholder programmewith growing public recognition of drought risk. The programme employed twomain strategies: better water demand management and finding additional, sustainablesources of water. The municipality conducted comprehensive water demand managementmeasures including clearing invasive alien plants, a public awareness campaignand a programme of leak detection and repair.World Disasters Report 2010 – Disaster data197