DISASTER MANAGEMENT PLANNING
The law places various onerous responsibilities on municipal engineers when it comes to disaster and risk management – and the growth of informal settlements in the context of climate change is only raising these risks.
Informal settlements still pose a real challenge for disaster management
required for this mapping may not always be readily available. He notes that the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed some weaknesses in the application of the Act. While this law had been used to impose and enforce the lockdowns, there were legally specified disaster management bodies that were not functioning. “The pandemic also highlighted that there were local, metropolitan and district municipalities that were not up to speed with their disaster management plans, and had not constituted the required bodies like advisory forums,” says Fourie.
Role of municipal engineers vital in managing disaster risk
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ccording to Andries Fourie, senior technologist: Disaster and Risk Management at SRK Consulting, the 2015 amendments to the Disaster Management Act (No. 57 of 2002) have raised the bar for municipal engineers – particularly the section of the Act dealing with disaster management plans. “Every municipality must conduct a disaster risk assessment and then prepare a full disaster management plan – the implementation of which must align and coordinate with other organs of state and institutional role-players,” says Fourie. A key part of an engineer’s role in planning for how the municipality will respond to disasters is to ensure that the necessary investment in risk reduction is made. Fourie emphasises the law’s requirement that
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the municipality must provide measures and indicate how it will invest in disaster risk reduction. “There is also specific reference in the Act to climate change adaptation, which is a growing area of concern – especially with regard to risks faced by informal settlements,” he says. “The varying weather patterns that accompany climate change are aggravating risks like flooding; municipal engineers are now having to plan more carefully to ensure that the necessary infrastructural investments are made.” An important addition in the amended law is the element of mapping the risks; this means the employment of geographic information systems (GIS) to gather, map and analyse risks in a visual format. An added Andries Fourie, senior technologist: Disaster challenge – especially in many smaller and Risk Management, SRK Consulting municipalities – is that the information
