Community Scale Landslide Resilience: A Citizen-Science Approach

Abstract

AbstractBuilding landslide resilience at a community scale is the most effective way to protect people against landslides. But building resilience at a community scale can become difficult, given the large spatial scale spanned by locations vulnerable to landslides and the number of communities that might get affected. So, in this chapter, we discuss how to build community-scale landslide resilience using a citizen-science approach. The potential of citizen-science approaches for building landslide resilience at the community level is immense, given that the citizens become resources to build resilience. Yet challenges exist in this approach as novel tools and operationalizing methods are seldom found in the literature. Therefore, this chapter examines the requirements, solutions, and dimensions of landslide resilience and presents a framework to strengthen community-scale resilience. The framework addresses how citizens can be engaged before, during, and after a disaster. This chapter also presents a few example tools used to operationalize this theoretical framework, such as Landslide tracker mobile app, Amritakripa mobile app, social media data analysis, and community involvement. It also examines the difficulties found while applying the citizen science approach in two case study locations in India: Munnar in the Western Ghats and Chandmari in Sikkim. This chapter and the case study can help policymakers, community leaders, change makers, administrative officials, and researchers in disaster management.