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Land tenure in disaster risk management: Case of Flooding in Nepal

Charoenkalunyuta, Chinnapan (2011) Land tenure in disaster risk management: Case of Flooding in Nepal.

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Abstract:The effect of a disaster is increasingly becoming serious problem worldwide. After the disaster, people in the community often become landless either due to demise of family member(s), inability to prove land ownership or the land being unusable. In such situation, most vulnerable people are those who depend upon access to land with insecure land rights for their livelihood. Addressing land issues in a broad context promotes disaster resilience by providing secure land tenure access for shelter and land use, and it reduces the vulnerability of community. Land tenure plays an important role in the disaster prone areas in pre and post disaster phase for the implementation of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) plan effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, if land tenure security is enhanced, it also improves the resilience of the people or community at large. This research focuses on the resilience of people in the community from land tenure perspective in the case of disaster caused by the flood. The literature study from several countries indicates four most prominent elements that are needed for increasing resilience of the people in a community. These are; land tenure security, well-planned DRM activities, a reliable land registration system and stakeholders' interaction. In order to look deeper on these elements, primary and secondary data were collected from the field study area, a village called Dibyanagar of Chitwan district in Nepal. This area usually gets affected by the disaster caused due to flooding from the river flowing alongside the village, and affects shelter and livelihood of the people in the communities. Household surveys, stakeholder interviews and field survey observation were carried out to collect primary data, while the relevant documents, local DRM plans and sets of spatial data (digital cadastral data, GeoEye images, and aerial photographs) were collected as secondary data for the study. The result of data processing indicates that 94% of the land parcels have private ownership hold by the people/landowners, while only 6% of land belongs to the government. The study also shows that about 11 % of land area was swapped away by the flood and 52% of land area is still falls under hazardous zone while 37% of land area is found completely safe from the disaster. Despite all these land parcels are registered and land disputes are not the major issues in the area, the analysis reveals that land tenure security is weak. The results of the household surveys and stakeholder interviews reveal that the DRM activities are well managed in practice on the response (emergency time), recovery (post-disaster) and prevention, but the organisations involved do not often share the available data such as hazard map. It is also found that because of their experiences, the people in community can respond the disaster risk very well by following the procedure to be taken during emergency time. This research finally reveals the responsible organisations need to improve a) land tenure security in broader context by bringing land policy into implementation, and b) interaction with the organizations involved to complement the DRM activities by sharing timely relevant data for increasing the disaster resilience of the people in the community. Keywords: Land tenure, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, Vulnerability, Flood
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:ITC: Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation
Programme:Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation MSc (75014)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/93187
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