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- Permanent Link:
- http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/FI13042647/00001
Notes
- Summary:
- This document highlights GTZ’s work with the inter-municipal organization Mancomunidad de los Municipios del Centro de Atlántida (MAMUCA) to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable communities in Honduras to address disaster risks. The Caribbean coast of Central America is amongst the most vulnerable to natural hazards. Its communities are often the poorest, in the most environmentally vulnerable areas, and most exposed to the threat of hazards. Honduras in particular is the third poorest nation in Latin America, with over half of its population identified as generally poor. Two events, Hurricanes Mitch and Michelle, laid bare the degree of intersection between poverty, lack of government capacity, and disaster, while forcing communities in northern Honduras to change how they addressed disaster risks. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch caused the death of over 10,000 people throughout the region, 70% in Honduras alone, and nearly $7 billion in economic damages. Three years after much of the physical damage had been repaired, a substantial proportion of the displaced rehoused, and the national emergency response system strengthened, another hurricane, Michelle, destroyed livelihoods and critical infrastructure again, forcing stakeholders to reevaluate previous efforts to deal with disaster risks. The central theme of the document is the critical importance GTZ places on increasing capacity for disaster risk management (DRM) at the local level. It presents the PROMAMUCA project as an example of successful community-based DRM. The report outlines project principles, indicators of success, the dynamics between MAMUCA and local participants, and results achieved in strengthening Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) awareness and implementation of DRR projects. The most interesting aspect of the work is its conceptualization of community-based DRM within a networking framework. The document emphasizes the critical role that local communities played in the various stages of DRM, from identifying and mapping hazards to the development of DRM training programs. It also highlights inter-municipal cooperation as a means to attain a variety of community-development objectives outside of DRM, including water resource management, waste management, infrastructure development, and economic development planning. The project’s simplicity lends itself to easy modification and transference to other developing contexts where populations are also highly vulnerable to disasters. ( ,,,, )
- Subject:
- General Risk Management
- Subject:
- Politics
- Citation/Reference:
- (2005). Honduras: community-based disaster risk management and intermunicipal cooperation. Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit/German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ).
Record Information
- Source Institution:
- Florida International University
- Rights Management:
- Refer to main document/publisher for use rights.
- Resource Identifier:
- FI13042647
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