Disasters are foreseeable phenomena in today’s time and age. The disasters may not be the necessary result of hazards, more often they occur when these hazards intersect with the environment, inappropriate location, inadequate infrastructure development and lack of capacity of responders to deal with the disaster.
National Disaster Management Act 2010, envisages a paradigm shift from response centric syndrome to a proactive, holistic and integrated management of disasters with emphasis on prevention, mitigation and preparedness. This National vision, inter alia aims at inculcating a culture of preparedness of all stakeholders. Training of different stakeholders is the most important to achieve this end and in future, efficient disaster response will depend primarily on effectiveness of the training of responder (s).
Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) in consultation with Pakistan Resilience Partnership (PRP) partners is undertaking number of capacity building trainings to institutionalize a robust training regime at provincial level to offset existing inadequacies in response against disasters while also strengthening the coordination mechanism amongst the humantrainian community working in Pakistan. In order to standardize the training material to be used for theses training in future, this manual has been developed. This manual focuses on operational aspects of disaster response as well as preparing for disasters.