Disaster risk management for community resilience in Lembah Bertam, Cameron Highland

Abstract

Recent attentions of disaster-response professionals, government officials and academics are turning from disaster vulnerability towards disaster resilience. The current approach measures are focusing on the preferred way to help communities to help themselves as part of community engagement with natural hazard reduction. The increasing rate of natural disasters in Lembah Bertam have pointed out the vulnerability of community and the lack of proactive measures to eliminate or mitigate the impact of disasters. The area was heavily affected during the flood in 2013 and 2014 when water was released from nearby hydroelectric dam due to rapid water increase in reservoir during heavy downpour. Henceforth, the operation of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) measures in Lembah Bertam are expected to contribute towards cultivating the social resilience so that the adverse impact of natural disasters can be eliminated or mitigated, hence allowing the vulnerable communities to prepare, adapt and responds better towards the disaster impact and pressure. Therefore, the aim of this research is to study the DRM practices in Lembah Bertam for the enhancement of community resilience towards natural disasters. The objectives of this study are (i) to identify the Disaster Risk Management practices in Lembah Bertam based on key measures of DRM, and (ii) to assess the social resilience of community towards disaster using coping and adaptive capacity resilience assessment. The DRM measures of Lembah Bertam were compared with other vulnerable countries while the method used to study community resilience is face-to-face intercept survey questionnaire. The data retrieved determines the characteristics of community resilience for further corrective measures in the future. Descriptive analysis was used to determine the community resilient based on data from the survey. The study claims that under-developed disaster risk management measures lead to weak social coping and adaptive capacity in which have resulted in poor social resilience. The comparison of DRM measures proved that Lembah Bertam is in need of recent and more focused DRM policy and physical implementations. As a result, the findings show that an effective strategy of resilience involves not only the government effort and social infrastructure alone, but also the reliability of physical infrastructure. In developing a better social resilience of community, it is necessary to recognize that people have different vulnerabilities due to their cultural background, ethnicity and other factors that influences their capacity to expect, prepare, response and recover from disasters.