Investigating Mainstreaming DRR into the Critical Infrastructure at District Mardan

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been an increase in the rate of disaster events. These disasters claimed precious lives and destroyed developments, gained during the previous years or even centuries. These developmental gains included critical facilities such as schools, hospitals, fire stations, blood banks, power stations and transport networks. Pakistan has also seen and experienced some of the worst disasters of the history which had uprooted and destroyed number of schools and health facilities. The theme of this research study is to investigate mainstreaming of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) into Critical Infrastructure (CI) i.e. in schools and hospitals and to evaluate the implementation issues in this regard. Field data was collected through structured questionnaires from schools and hospitals. School questionnaire was based and designed on Comprehensive School Safety Framework by UNISDR while for hospitals, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization (WHO) “Hospital Safety Index” (HIS) tool was used. The research statistics confirms that there