Sri Lanka is blessed with a catalogue of natural resources, positioning, networking and various terrain that support an abundance of fauna and flora. However, each year, Sri Lanka faces several cycles of drought and torrential rains, which disrupt day to day life and often ruins seasonal crops which many Sri Lankans are dependent on as a livelihood and as food.  With climate change becoming a ‘hot’ topic, and with the realisation that moving forward the frequency of climate-related disruptions to Sri Lanka will likely increase, making climate and disaster resilience a focus area for the island nation is not only prudent, but vital to maintain economic and social stability. ‘Extreme weather events’ are happening more frequently, and it is high time Sri Lanka acted to build resilience.   

This week, like each year before, Sri Lanka is once again facing torrential rains, and with it increased risk of landslides, flash flooding, flooding, trees being uprooted and coastal erosion, to mention a few. However, Sri Lanka doesn’t have a robust national programme to mitigate the social and economic damages from the recurring events, and each year, the lives of many Sri Lankans are lost to such tragedies. While climate-related damages are not completely preventable, they can be managed to an extent. 

Given Sri Lanka’s fragile state, and with a focus on economic recovery, the island nation can ill afford not to take climate resilience and extreme weather events seriously. As Sri Lanka’s industrial base is in the Western Province, and that the services and connectivity hub is in the Colombo District, a robust flood management and mitigation plan is essential to keep the governance and trade hub of the island dry, and not disrupted.

During the last few years, with the economic crisis, the prolonged drought in several parts of the island coupled with a dollar shortage to import, created a food security crisis, with local and international experts raising alarm about a crisis in child nutrition and its long-term effects. The lack of rains, and the need to prioritise water use between power generation and for agriculture, left Sri Lanka losing on both accounts. It also resulted in significant crop loss, causing some farmers to abandon agriculture altogether. Sri Lanka cannot afford another such period. As such, the drought and the water management related to it, put Sri Lanka’s food security and energy security at risk. Granted, there were other contributing factors, but the impact was certainly magnified by the lack of climate resilience in Sri Lanka.  

According to the World Bank, the floods and landslides caused by heavy rainfall in 2016 wreaked havoc in Sri Lanka. One of the most heavily impacted areas was the flood-prone Kelani River basin, where flooding affected thousands of people and caused over an estimated $ 500 million in losses in the Greater Colombo area. Such extreme weather events have been increasingly common in Sri Lanka, with floods impacting around 14 million people between 2010 and 2018. Following such events over the last decades, the Government, working with international agencies and donors have initiated multiple national level projects, both using infrastructure and urban planning to address key flood-related challenges.

However, one key area in building climate resilience is often overlooked by the State; awareness building and education. The Sri Lankan masses will likely not move to take climate resilience and extreme weather event preparedness seriously, unless there is a solid programme to build awareness. The Government should strongly consider introducing climate change and climate resilience as a part of ‘civics’ education, in the curriculum. Resilience is built from ground up, and often requires a grassroots effort to get it off the ground, and that mobilisation will likely only come, if there is a robust understanding of what the issue is and how to face it. Therefore, the Government should start with the education system, and gradually introduce climate resilience as important work for local government bodies first. At the end of the day, a community is best placed to help itself, as they know their locality and what affects it better than others.