Participatory GIS as a tool for flood mapping in climate change adaptation: a study of Batticaloa city, Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Flood is identified as one of the most frequent climate exacerbated disasters in Sri Lanka. Meteorological records reveal that the extreme rainfall events and frequent occurrence of floods is on increase over recent decades in most of the cities in Sri Lanka. The assessment of vulnerability in terms of temporal and spatial is identified as a prerequisite for adaptation planning, to make cities more resilient to climate change. The current information base related to flood hazard, which is produced by national agencies, is appropriate for decision-making at national and provincial levels but not at local level. Non-availability of reliable and reasonably accurate flow of information among all stakeholders at local level has hampered the development of cities as climate resilient to respond disasters. The production of flood hazard database for a city using conventional methods and approaches (engineering and surveying) is an expensive and time consuming task. In this context, this research has been carried out to test the applicability of Participatory GIS (PGIS) to produce acceptable and realistic flood maps to identify the flood risk for the city in shortest time period based on evidenced risk to respond climate exacerbated disasters. This paper demonstrates the use of PGIS methodology adapted to collect and integrate the community knowledge and the capability to develop reliable and realistic flood map database for their own city. The overall contribution of this work lies in demonstrating a grass-root level participatory approach to collect, analyze and demonstrate flood records for the development of a database to respond climate exacerbated disasters in the process of making climate resilient cities. Key words: , , ,