Community Capacity and Needs Assessment on Flood Early Warning - A Case Study in Bangladesh

Abstract

In Bangladesh, household and community response to extreme recurring events like flood is a factor of the extent of their vulnerability, the intensity of the hazard, and their level of capacity. If people are informed ahead in time of the flood, more actions they can take to prepare to reduce their risks and vulnerability. Flood early warning depends on the ability of relevant national, local and community institutions capacities to understand, interpretation, dissemination and response performance. Interruption in one single stage would fail the overall early warning system. Thus community capacity and need assessment is essential to design a robust and effective early warning system. This paper illustrates community capacity and need assessment on flood warning system through understanding people’s perception on floods, existing warning and dissemination system, vulnerabilities, risk and coping mechanism. The methodology includes semi-structured questionnaires as well as workshops and Focused Group Discussions (FGDs). The survey findings substantiated that still households has lack of access to information, don’t understand the flood nomenclature and majority of the population couldn’t able to interpret and translate science information for local decision making even though information could be available.