Participatory disaster information gathering approach for urban flood resilience

Flooding is an indivisible component of nature facing by the human across the world. It is proven that ‘flood’ is highly required to the cyclical process of river based ecosystems. During the last few centuries, the global urbanization has been severely affected by the phenomena of flood among all types of natural disasters which occur worldwide, as the most frequent disaster occurrence. The artificial alterations plus over exploitation of the natural functioning of water cycle have been causing devastating flood events increasingly. Sustainable Development of the human settlements is being threatened by frequent flood occurrences and their consequences where flooding has become a negative event in the context of rapid urbanization. On this background, this study aims to achieve the objective of examining the applicability of community based information to increase the flood resilience in the urban regions affected by storm water and flood occurrences, taking Kalu Oya Basin of Northern Colombo, Sri Lanka as the case study region. In the context of mixed urban to rural continuum of Kalu Oya basin, the utilized tools of community based information gathering techniques were proven greatly successful enabling a fruitful interaction to gather the different scenarios on living with flood.