Improving seismic resilience of schools and educational communities

Abstract

The sustainability of school infrastructure and the resilience of the educational communities to natural hazards is of paramount importance to provide the safety and protection from the various natural and man-made threats children face. As an example, during the 2015 Nepal earthquake over 600,000 buildings were destroyed, including 19,700 collapsed classrooms in 8,620 schools and an estimated 3.2 million children were displaced. After a natural disaster, it is typical for most efforts to focus on shelter, recovery and reconstruction without due consideration of a wider framework for building back better school buildings and at the same time creating infrastructure and institutions that are resilient to different shocks and stresses. Our large-scale research, through SAFER Nepal project (www.safernepal.net) funded through Global Challenges Research Fund, has addressed this need. The objective of this contribution is to report on the developments for improving the earthquake-related safety of school buildings and enabling the educational communities to become resilient against a range of hazards.

In Nepal and many other countries, many school buildings are non-compliant with building codes and during the monsoon season there is a higher risk of landslides in the earthquake affected areas for years to come. From a disaster resilient infrastructure perspective, there are a number of strategic challenges and one of particular importance to the local authorities and stakeholders relates to the need for a holistic framework for the pre- and post-assessment of school buildings under a standardised procedure. Such a framework has been built into the SAFER toolbox thus enabling prioritisation of school buildings for retrofitting and adaptation measures at different geographic scales. The scoring procedure used here is capable of incorporating relevant data for any country and this has already been done for Nepal and Malawi.

The other aspect of the SAFER toolbox relates to the evaluation of resilience of educational community. A community resilience framework has been developed which consists of fourteen indicators covering from social aspects to governance and shocks to preparedness. This can be used by the educational community for the self-assessment of schools and track their resilience with time.

The results of both assessments, structural safety and community resilience, are provided on a map for decision-making at appropriate levels. The capabilities of the SAFER toolbox will be illustrated through typical schools from Nepal. Such an informed decision-making and timely resilience-building can greatly mitigate the social and financial impact of future earthquake events.