Climate Change and Local Level Disaster Risk Reduction Planning ...

obustness in dealing with climate change related uncertainties especially the extreme events as
climate change was suggested to influence the tails of weather distributions if a significant shift in
the means is to be expected (Burton, 1997).
The amount of redundancy a disaster risk management plan could incorporate depends on
various factors such as the rate at which risks are assumed to grow and availability of financial,
human and technological resources since incorporation of redundancy means additional demand
for these resources. A close observation of global and regional projections of climate change may
help in deciding the redundancy one may want to incorporate at the local level though such
incorporations are solely qualitative decisions and pose the risk of being questioned for the
decisions taken at a later point of time. Such decisions may be widely supported when the
disaster risk management planning addresses some critical sectors. Redundancy can bring lots of
benefits to the plan and disaster risk managers. Added redundancy means lesser frequent
revisions and updating of the plans, more reliability, and effectiveness leading to sustainable risk
reduction. However, one need to be cautious in overweighing this option in policy decisions as a
balanced approach was called for (Kates, 2000). In the next section, we provided a simple scheme
that facilitates decisions like these in the context of climate change.
2. A scheme for incorporating climate change
concerns in disaster risk management
planning
One of the best ways to mainstream climate change concerns in disaster risk management
planning is to understand current and future possible impacts and address them in developmental
and risk reduction planning. For this, one need to look at a range of climate scenarios generated
and overlay them with future socio-economic scenarios to obtain future risks (Jones and Mearns,
2005). However, there are limitations such as lack of availability of dependable high-resolution
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Figure 5