Disaster mitigation and recovery

We helped Cambodia’s fledgling Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology build its capacity in planning and delivering investment projects to remedy irrigation system damage from the Pol Pot regime

Empowering businesses and communities as well as governments

Mitigating disaster impact to ensure rapid economic and social recovery is a major responsibility of governments everywhere.

But they cannot do this alone. Empowering businesses, communities and individuals to cope with disasters and lead recovery through preparedness and planning is now seen as the most effective and sustainable way of dealing with our uncertain world – and in this Mott MacDonald provides assistance world-wide.

Mapping rivers and coastlines to show the potential extent of possible flood events is now commonplace and making this information freely available to individual home owners, businesses and developers enables communities rather than just govern-ments to assess their risk of being flooded. Appropriate infrastructure also remains an important part of the mitigation process through cost-effective flood defences and developments that work with nature not against it.

But empowering the poor is more challenging, especially within fragile states where years of conflict or ineffective governance have left communities with little or no capacity to make choices about their well-being. These communities often live in the most disaster prone areas and in housing that offers no security against nature’s floods, hurricanes or earthquakes.

Mitigation through infrastructure alone is rarely affordable. But whatever a country’s capacity to deal with disasters Mott MacDonald is experienced in helping governments, businesses, NGOs and communities to prepare for or, in the worst case scenario, deal with the after effects of a major disaster. Our multi-sectoral skill base embracing education, health and water combined with our local presence throughout the world means that as well as understanding the technical issues we have a deep insight into the cultural setting and national capacity to deal with nature’s worst – and ensure a sustainable recovery.