Rebuild Sri Lanka Better: A plea of Wildlife and Nature Protection Society

There is no need to reinvent. What is needed is mainstreaming nature's contribution across all sectors and looking beyond short-term benefits

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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.

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.

■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 Forest should introduce a buffer zone for all Protected Areas immediately.

Enforce 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 Organisation (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.