Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Sri Lanka is an island state whose land and people are exposed to various natural and technological or anthropogenic hazards – disease outbreak, drought, earthquake, flooding, fire, hazardous materials incident, heat, landslide, shipping or aviation accident, storm, and tsunami. Not infrequently, national stakeholders are working to address more than one hazard event simultaneously as drought or a dengue outbreak strikes one region of the country while flooding and landslides impact another region.
The devastation that the 2004 Indian Ocean “Boxing Day” tsunami wrought in Sri Lanka triggered wide and deep reform to the country’s legal and institutional structures for emergency management. Only six months after the tsunami, the Government had a new Disaster Management (DM) Act in place and was establishing the National Disaster Management Council, which was followed by establishment of the Disaster Management Centre (DMC). Since then, DM offices have stood up throughout the country, and technical agencies continue to work to understand hazards and mitigate risk alongside national and international partners.
Sri Lanka’s DM structure now fully integrates disaster risk reduction (DRR), risk management, climate change adaptation (CCA), and climate mitigation. This shift has been realized with the development of the most recent National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP), in which the country has integrated the DM cycle – prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery – rather than retaining the past relief-centered approach. The new approach means that the country continues to work to develop a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach by ensuring coherence across laws, policies, and plans, building information networks, extending opportunities to all Sri Lankans, coordinating responses when they are needed, and enabling more resilient recovery. Over the years, Sri Lanka has benefited from
its partnerships with United Nations (UN) system agencies and bilateral and multilateral stakeholders to build all facets of the DM cycle. The key institutions involved in DM are the DMC and National Building Research Organisation (NBRO), both under the Ministry of Defence. Together, and in cooperation with other national agencies, sub-national governments, and civil society, the DMC and NBRO analyze hazard exposure, assess risk, and help develop and implement plans and regulations to mitigate assessed risk and launch responses to hazard events. The most recent innovation in the country’s DRR approach has been ecosystem-based DRR and ecosystem-based adaptation, both of which reflect the seriousness with which the country takes the potential for climate change to exacerbate the hazards it confronts.
Based on the country’s own assessment, some 87% of the population lives in a place that is considered at moderate or severe risk of a disaster. Moreover, increasing demand for water and land, rising urbanization, and unplanned development are contributing to rising risk. In conjunction with the influence of climate change, these elements spell a problematic future if DRR is not mainstreamed into government, business, and community action. However, the country’s DM and climate change agencies remain somewhat siloed within the central government structure. Efforts to meet the country’s commitments under global climate agreements will require not only national action but international assistance in the form of financial options and technical support. Since the end of the civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka’s government has worked to rebuild its international and regional ties to ensure that it is not acting alone to address shared challenges, and ongoing shifts and incomplete reform agendas continue to slow the country’s march toward full-scale participation in international and regional hazard mitigation and climate change action.