Disaster-prone Davao City villages urged to codify local plans
A paper by Assoc. Prof. Karen Joyce Cayamanda urged barangay or village groups to share best practices and codify their experiences following flooding and other localized disasters in order to build up apt responses in various areas. Prof. Cayamanda made this recommendation in her paper on risk communication management presented at the 3rd International Conference on Multidisciplinary Industry and Academic Research (ICMIAR) held online on July 29-30, 2022. Cayamanda said sharing community-based experiences can show how community members react and adapt to disasters and stimulate risk perception and communication among residents, from which community mechanisms can emerge that strengthen the collective responses and increase a community’s resilience against future threats.
Prof. Cayamanda’s paper earned her a “Best Presenter” award at the conference plenary session and acquires renewed relevance in the wake of recent community-level disruptions in her study area and continuing local government efforts to improve their DRRM system.
“The prevalent risk communication system is ‘top-down’ despite local residents' awareness of their vulnerability,” she said.
“In this way, communities can build or discover their own adaptive mechanisms, encourage an active response, and further strengthen the community. Their efforts can complement the traditional ‘top-down’ centralized disaster risk-reduction management (DRRM) approach,” she said.
The ICMIAR conference, with the theme “Sustaining community resilience through education and research,” was organized by the Institute of Industry and Academic Research Incorporated, a registered publisher and continuing professional development provider. It also had sessions focusing on business management and accounting, education management and development studies, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the humanities and the social sciences.
Recently, Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte told barangays to consolidate similar concerns, including security and disaster response, as the local government drafts its executive-legislative agenda in the next few months.
Traditionally, the local government places a large percentage of its annual budget for disaster response as a part of the Local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund.