Disaster Risk Management For Coastal Tourism Destinations - DTIE

Disaster Risk Management For Coastal Tourism Destinations Responding To Climate Change
A Practical Guide For Decision Makers
Although some of the following activities may have already been completed by the
local disaster management agency, they provide a useful starting point for identifying
and prioritizing risks:
1) Research newspapers and other historical records. These records will
often contain dates, magnitudes of previous events, damages, and further
evidence of past natural disasters.
2) Review existing plans and reports. National, regional or local disaster
management plans, as well as local facility or business continuity plans, may
contain information on past natural hazards affecting the tourism destination.
3) Talk to experts in the community, state or region. Start locally with the
involved with past natural hazard events. Furthermore, state or national
resource agencies, including the geological survey, water and natural
resource agencies will have detailed knowledge about the nature and
extent of hazards at the destination. University departments and research
documents may also provide useful information. In more remote settings,
talk to community elders who often have the best anecdotal perspective.
4) Gather information from Internet websites. The websites noted at the end
of this Handbook can provide general information on particular hazards and
their probabilities of occurrence. Search databases or computerized archives
with a list of potential hazards and narrow the search by using the name of
the destination as keywords.
5) Assemble a disaster chronology. Prepare a disaster chronology that lists
previous disasters or emergencies that have affected the destination.
Describe the magnitude of the event and extent of damages that occurred.
6) Convene a meeting of the Coordinating Group
the preliminary research. Identify and assess those natural hazards that have
repeatedly affected the destination or that the experts regard as the major
existing plans. Prioritize and rank the list of all potential natural hazards
using simple ranking techniques (see Table A.1, Appendix A). The outcome
of this process is a short list of primary hazards that will receive more
detailed evaluation in the following task.
52 | Managing Disaster Risks At Coastal Tourism Destinations