'Nagaland is one of the Most Multi-Hazard Prone States of India'

Guwahati: The executive summary of the Departmental Disaster Management Template by the Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority has stated that Nagaland as one of the most multi-hazard prone states of India.

The Summary Report also stated that “The state faces various types of natural hazards like geological hazards of earthquake and landslide; hydrological hazards of flash floods, storms, hailstorms and cloudbursts; and climatologically hazards of droughts and forest fire.”

The frequency and intensity of most of the hydrometeorological hazards are compounded by climate change and its impacts on agriculture, horticulture, human settlements, and human and animal health.

The report further stated that Every year the state of Nagaland has been plunged into a state of crisis due to heavy thunderstorms and incessant rains, with many areas of low lying hills flooded and submerged, including large parts of the commercial city Dimapur requiring hectic evacuation and rescue operations resulting in several causalities, damage of properties/crops/livestock

NSDMA stated that the state government has been putting all efforts to contain the crisis, however beyond the coping capability of the state due to massive quantum of infrastructural damages in many locations.

The climate induced disasters have been impacting directly in the developmental front especially for a hilly state like Nagaland, it observed.

During 2018, due to the extreme weather pattern, the economic costs of disasters for Nagaland was high and is likely to increase in the future due to climate change factors, it postulated, adding that infrastructural damages especially in the road and bridges sector and impact of disaster on individual properties have direct reversed impact on economic growth of the state.

“The infrastructures which took many years to build has been washed away or destroyed in few seconds,” it stated, adding that the rebuilding of such damaged infrastructure will impact and halt developmental progress.

Assessing the economic impacts of disasters should be the priority of rational investment, it stated adding that disasters have been, and continue to be human tragedies.

Government policy and/for public investment should take into account the impact of disasters for the economic growth of the community.

In recent years, Nagaland has experience micro effect of climate change which is leading the state towards more vulnerable and hazardous zone, it said. The report meanwhile pointed out that drastic changes in the annual rainfall have caused huge loss to the agro state economy.

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