REBUILD SRI LANKA BETTER: A Plea of the Wildlife & Nature Protection Society

There will be future cyclones and other such natural cataclysms as the warming equatorial seas result in greater surface evaporation that feed rain clouds and strong winds.

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In Sri Lanka, Cyclone Ditwah exposed a critical gap in dealing with such an event: the lack of integration between disaster preparedness and ecosystem health. Sri Lanka must evolve from viewing ecosystems as "victims" of climate change to treating them as the "primary defence" in mitigating climate disasters. We need to stop relying solely on concrete seawalls and drainage canals which fail during extreme weather. We need to move to hybrid engineering thereby combining hard infrastructure with green buffers. This requires realigning national strategies to treat Ecosystem-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (Eco-DRR) as a National Security Priority.

PROPOSALS FOR THE PREVENTION OF LANDSLIDES:

All illegal structures and construction on protected areas and buffer zones at an elevation above 5,000 feet should be removed and the people moved out settled; all within the next two years. The Department of nforce the Soil Conservation Act, with due rigour, in all areas.

The ecosystems within the altitudes of 2,000-5,000 feet are equally critical. All illegal construction and shops, hotels, homes and establishments built on water reservation areas, buffer zones, protected areas and roadside and railway reservations should be issued vacation notices with a timeline of no more than three years to comply.

All the areas where landslides took place should immediately be demarcated by the National Building Research Organization (NBRO) as High-Risk Landslide Prone Areas. Reconstruction or future construction should NOT be permitted on those areas, from the hills right up to the roadsides.

The CEA or relevant authority should add a further 30-50 meters on either side of the earth slip boundaries and declare them Conservation Areas including the earth slip footprint. This should be followed by a major tree planting campaign to bring back native trees onto those locations.