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i-RESIST

i-RESIST: Resilience of Schools in Indonesia to disaster.

Decorative

PI: Dr Carmine Galasso
UCL Department: Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering
Partner countries: Indonesia
Funders: GCRF (Internal)

Project description

Access to education is a basic human right and is the focus of SDG 4. Providing facilities to educate children requires construction of school buildings and rapid expansion of curricula. However, in the rush to fulfil the right to education, what attention is being given to structural safety and resilience against natural hazards during the construction of new school facilities? Three-quarters of schools in Indonesia, with at least 40M students, are in natural hazard-prone areas. In any of the 2015-2018 World Disaster Reports, Indonesia ranked as one of the most disaster-prone countries.

i-RESIST was funded through UCL internal GCRF funding and was a subsidiary of the Newton Fund awarded INSPIRE project (INSPIRE – Indonesia School Programme to Increase Resilience). i-RESIST has piloted the development of an advanced and harmonised risk and resilience assessment framework for school infrastructure in Indonesia, subjected to cascading earthquake-tsunami hazards.

The project has:

  • Assessed the engineering impact of earthquakes/tsunami on school buildings in Banda Aceh, through purpose-developed computational models and fieldwork
  • Investigated the enhancement of earthquake/tsunami resilience of school infrastructure through retrofitting of school buildings and capacity building with local researchers/engineers
  • Raised public awareness and promoted community participation in safer schools through community/regional educational campaigns/workshops (and related educational material).

A set of practice-oriented reports and guidelines, a mobile app, and training workshops (with related education material) on multi-hazard risk and resilience assessment of school infrastructure have also been produced, validated through application to Banda Aceh. In addition, concise policy proposals have been sent to the desk of Indonesian local and national authorities.

Collaborations and partnerships in LMICs

i-RESIST included partnerships with the Tsunami and Disaster Mitigation Research Center (TDMRC), Syiah Kuala University, Indonesia. TDMRC is located at ground zero of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean mega-tsunami disaster, providing the i-RESIST team with a unique opportunity to utilise TDMRC-own neighbourhood and experience as a real laboratory for applied research in earthquake/tsunami engineering. Formal collaboration agreements have been drawn, highlighting the roles/contributions and potential for exploitation of input/outputs.

The benefits and impacts of the project activities to LMICs

i-RESIST has strengthened the research capabilities and capacities of TDMRC, exposing its researchers to new methods/tools and state-of-the-art approaches/frameworks for addressing multi-hazard resilience of infrastructure and communities. TDMRC is committed to further evolve i-RESIST findings/outputs, implementing them in-country.

At the country level, i-RESIST aimed to influence policy reforms and wider investments in DRR towards safer schools; and inform long-term national strategies that prioritise safety at scale and link previous and ongoing activities in the education sector.

i-RESIST generated evidence-based knowledge and made it available worldwide, particularly to other ODA countries, to promote/facilitate a long-term systematic approach to improving the safety of school infrastructure at scale, using quantitative risk assessments.