Supporting Flood Emergency Preparedness for Myanmar

Period of Performance

May 2017 - September 2019

Credit: SERVIR SEA

Through the Supporting Flood Emergency Preparedness for Myanmar Service, SERVIR Mekong co-developed and supported the use of a systematic decision-support tool for the Myanmar Department of Disaster Management (DDM) to identify areas with high flood risk in terms of historical flood frequency, socio-economic, and population data. Generated from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 data, the Joint Research Center (JRC) data set for historical flood frequency mapping was adapted to meet the needs in Myanmar. The resulting tool provided a historical flood map and flood risk index to enable more informed decisions on the exposure of people to floods for preparedness planning and effective advocacy for agricultural, urban, and city planning. SERVIR Mekong co-developed the tool with the DDM to ensure the department had the capacity to use the tool and continue developing it to meet their needs.

Rationale

Myanmar suffers devastating monsoon flooding including sudden-onset flash flooding on a frequent basis. The fast and effective management of floods relies on pre-planning to ensure the availability of supplies, shelters and emergency response personnel by the DDM under the Ministry of Social Welfare Relief & Resettlement, international actors, and local response from non-governmental organizations. Currently, the lack of systematic flood risk analysis means that the DDM collects local knowledge to inform their emergency planning. Although critical, this data collection takes significant resources and allows bias and human error to drive planning. 

Flood risk assessment requires several complex layers of information, including exposure of the population to a hazard and likelihood of the physical event. Some of this information can be contributed by mapping the frequency of a flood and population location data. To address these needs SERVIR Mekong is co-developing and supporting the use of a systematic decision-support tool for the Myanmar Department of Disaster Management (DDM) which will allow the identification of areas with high flood risk in terms of historical flood frequency, socio-economic, and population data and enable more informed decisions on the exposure of people to floods to support preparedness planning.