Review of project activities in light of revisions to ‘Disaster Management Act’ 2012

As a follow-up to the partners meeting held on the 28th of July 2013, the project team reviewed project activities against the clauses in the Disaster Management Act 2012. This became necessary since the legal provision in the Disaster Management Act 2012 prohibits all and any institutions/body except the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) from the generation of forecasts and dissemination of warnings. Furthermore, RIMES (Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System for Africa and Asia) had an agreement with the Comprehensive Disaster Management Program (CDMP), Bangladesh to support the BMD with weather/extreme weather events forecasting, numerical weather prediction, storm surge modeling, concurrent monitoring of Depressions and Cyclone Formation and Tracking and development of Pre-Impact Assessment Tools. As a result of this development, the initial role intended for CGC in the HIF project becomes void.

Accordingly since the project now needs to work with RIMES in order to be relevant in the early warning chain, a series of consultative meetings were planned to appraise complementarities and areas for collaboration between RIMES, BMD, CDMP and CARE and its existing partners.

The following activities were carried out in the month of August in the field:

• • Survey to determine status of the 50 Vehicle Tracking Service devices to gauge the continued interest of the fisher community considering the delays in project start-up. In general the boat owners were still keen to utilise the VTS as they were confident that it would be detrimental to the safety of the fishermen during a disaster or pirate attack. However the project also discovered that 4 units were damaged and 6 were unaccounted for. The project team will follow-up to understand the reasons behind this in order to prevent it from happening in the current phase of the project.

• • Two project sharing meetings with Union Disaster Management Committee (UDMC) of Choufaldandi and Jaliapalong Union Parishad. The team presented proposed project interventions and activities and laid the foundation to explore how UDMC and fishing communities can strengthen early warning chains and enhance community level DRR capacities.

• A Focus Group Discussion (FGD) was held at Monu para of Khirushkul union with the fishermen group; Village Development Committee (VDC); and Empowerment, Knowledge and Transformative Action (EKATA) members of another CARE project SHOUHARDO I. The sessions were planned to collectively identify their personal vulnerabilities and to their livelihoods and their coping mechanisms in the event of extreme weather conditions when in deep sea.