Using the skills and knowledge of built environment professionals to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable communities

Citation

Pathirage, C. (2012), "Using the skills and knowledge of built environment professionals to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable communities", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 3 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijdrbe.2012.43503caa.001

Using the skills and knowledge of built environment professionals to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable communities

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Volume 3, Issue 3

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) was founded in London in 1868 and granted a Royal Charter by Queen Victoria in 1881. It provides the world’s leading professional qualification in land, property, construction and the associated environmental issues. The term “surveyor” encompasses a wide range of professional skills recognised and accredited by the RICS, with some 100,000 members across the world. Professional institutions and associations operate in many countries, often forming a part of larger international networks of professional institutions. Their role is to represent the common interests of their members and promote the public role of the profession.

The importance of built environment professional expertise in preventing and responding to disasters is increasingly being recognised and as a result the related professional institutions, such as the RICS, are being urged to take an international role in sharing and exchanging experience and expertise on natural disasters. In response to this challenge and as a commitment to act in the interests of society, a guiding principle of the RICS, the RICS President’s Disaster Management Commission was set up in 2005. The Commission aims to bring the skills and knowledge of the RICS and other built environment professionals to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable communities to reduce disaster risks and improve post-disaster recovery. In order to promote the work of chartered surveyors, the Commission initiated a programme to develop a practical framework for bridging the gap between short-term relief and long-term reconstruction. In particular, the report “Mind the gap! Post-disaster reconstruction and the transition from humanitarian relief”, produced for the RICS by the Max Lock Centre at the University of Westminster, has been well received by many professionals involved in disaster management related activity. The report focused on issues of long-term recovery from natural disasters and the perceived gap between humanitarian relief, and efforts focused on reconstruction and the longer-term rehabilitation. The report also provided hope for the future – an opportunity to rebuild disaster zones and victims’ lives, to make things better than before the event: “reconstruction-plus”. Among many actions undertaken by the Disaster Management Commission, BuildAction is an initiative that places surveying and other built environment professionals on a pro bono basis with NGOs and humanitarian agencies to provide assistance to projects. In particular, BuildAction is considered as the operational arm of the Disaster Management Commission, with access to the extensive knowledge and resources of the RICS and the commissioners.

The RICS also organises an annual construction, building and real estate research conference called COBRA to facilitate debate and discussion among researchers and practitioners from around the world. For the first time in the event’s history, the 2010 COBRA conference included a special disaster management stream, organised by the University of Salford’s Centre for Disaster Resilience and in association with the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment. This association supports the journal’s objective to develop the skills and knowledge of the built environment professions and to strengthen their capacity in strategic and practical aspects of disaster preparedness, rehabilitation and reconstruction to mitigate the effects of disasters nationally and internationally. The conference was held at Dauphine Université Paris, France, in September 2010 and over 300 academics and professionals from all continents participated over the two-day conference, which featured various sessions on property and construction research. The disaster management themed session at COBRA 2010 brought many researchers and postgraduates together from all over the world. The session aimed to stimulate research ideas and views by exploring a range of perspectives from which the built environment is able to contribute towards improved resilience to disasters. Further this forum facilitated networking among researchers and the dissemination of existing knowledgebase. The disaster management session attracted more than 35 scholarly written research papers, a significant increase on the number published and presented at previous COBRA conferences. The papers address a wide range of themes: disaster mitigation and response; climate change and disasters; disaster resilience and risk reduction; knowledge management and disasters; skills and human resource aspects of disaster management; gender and disaster management; building design and management in reconstruction. The session also attracted a significant number of contributions from postgraduate researchers in the disaster management field, bringing together the international postgraduate community to present and discuss their research.

In recognition of the importance of promoting the exchange of ideas between researchers, educators, practitioners and policy makers, the Editors of the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment invited a number of extended papers from disaster management session at the COBRA 2010 research conference to be submitted for inclusion in an issue of the journal. Four of the six papers presented within Vol. 3, No. 3 were short-listed by the conference scientific committee during a double-blind peer review process and selected by the journal’s Editorial Board. A paper was selected by the conference scientific committee for the Best Paper Award and the winner of this Award, by Mark Tatum and Frank Terrell, explores the potential risks of hurricane reconstruction for construction companies located in Gulf Coastal cities from Texas to the East Coast of Florida in view of better understanding the positive and negative effects of hurricanes on the construction industry. The study identifies labour shortages, availability of materials, and issues with insurance companies as the main risks construction companies face, and stresses the importance of a hurricane construction plan that will help mitigate risk and increase the probability of success.

In the second paper, Asal Kamani-Fard, Mohd Hamdan Ahmad and Dilshan Remaz Ossen report a study that examined the efforts of the 2003 Bam earthquake survivors and their strategy for coping with home loss. In particular it considers the characteristics of lost settings located in a desert area while searching for the factors that made an impact on householders’ perception of newly built houses. Based on a field survey, the authors conclude that households who had a greater level of participation in the new house building process feel more attached to their homes and tend to arrange the new settings on the basis of their perceptions of home place.

Chaminda Pathirage, Krisanthi Seneviratne, Dilanthi Amaratunga and Richard Haigh explore key knowledge factors and challenges relating to the disaster management cycle, based on a study undertaken as part of the “ISLAND II” (Inspiring Sri-LankAn reNewal and Development) project. In the paper, the authors classify identified factors into eight categories and highlight the lack of detection and warning systems, the need for effective education, training and awareness raising programmes, the need for regular updating of disaster related laws, poor planning, poor communication, poor leadership, and poor institutional arrangement as the main challenges to be addressed.

In the fourth paper from the conference, Gina Cavan and Richard Kingston report on the development and testing of a risk and vulnerability assessment tool in a number of municipalities across Europe to support the development of climate adaptation action plans. The need to break down silos between departments in order to build an evidence base for decision makers for adaptation plans and strategies is highlighted as a key finding of this study. Authors confirm that the assessment tool is seen as innovative, cost effective, intuitive and simple to use and navigate, in addition to its ability to support the sharing of knowledge and expertise.

The issue also includes two further research articles. Richard Haigh and Richard Sutton present the results of an empirical study to better understand the nature and extent of the relationship between multi-national construction enterprises and efforts to reconstruct buildings and infrastructure following a disaster. The aim of the study was to identify what strategies and mechanisms might be utilised to achieve an effective level of participation by multi-national construction enterprises in post-disaster recovery efforts. The study involved qualitative interviews with stakeholders of reconstruction projects in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

In the final article, Rasel Madaha discusses the influence of gender roles and coping strategies during droughts in Tanzania, Africa. The study is based on data gathered from two case studies that were conducted for the Lay Volunteer International Association (LVIA) and World Vision Tanzania (WVT), respectively. The findings suggest that the Tanzanian communities and men in particular, need to abandon harmful gender roles for the survival of their communities and at the same time posits as a challenge to those who oppose efforts to address climate change and the associated global warming.

The issue concludes with a review of The Politics of Climate Change by Maximiliano Korstanje and a news article about an RICS funded research project “Developing Flood Expert kNowledge in CharterEd Surveyors (DEFENCES)”.

Chaminda Pathirage