Sri Lanka's disaster problem isn't just nature-it's architecture

WHEN floods and landslides strike Sri Lanka, the public conversation almost always turns to nature.

- By Shanika Somatilake

Heavy rain, deforestation, hill cutting, and river encroachment are cited as the culprits. These factors are real and serious: forest loss accelerates runoff, altered slopes destabilise terrain, and encroached floodplains erase natural buffers. None of this can be denied. Yet environmental degradation alone does not explain why disasters repeatedly unfold with late warnings, confused responses, and post-event blame.The deeper problem is architectural. Not architecture in the sense of buildings or dams, but the governance and control systems that translate environmental signals such as rainfall, river levels, reservoir storage, slope saturation into timely, enforceable public action. Environmental damage increases the load on this system. The absence of an integrated hazard management architecture is what allows that load to become a catastrophe.

Each major flood exposes a persistent gap in Sri Lanka's disaster management framework. Public debate quickly narrows to familiar, technical-sounding questions: Were reservoir gates opened too quickly? Were warnings issued on time? Was the rainfall truly unprecedented?

While these questions appear precise, they are largely distractions. They reduce what is fundamentally a national-scale systems failure into a sequence of isolated operational errors. This framing obscures the deeper issue: the absence of a coherent governance mechanism capable of integrating environmental realities into enforceable, statewide decisions.

From an engineering perspective, Sri Lanka’s challenge is not rooted in a lack of awareness, expertise, or concern. Rather, it lies in the absence of an executable hazard governance operating system, one that can systematically connect data, forecasts, and risk assessments to binding actions across institutions. Without such a system, responses remain fragmented, reactive, and vulnerable to repetition of the same failures with each new flood.