CIFAL Newcastle organizes workshop on building codes for disaster resilience

UNITAR’s Affiliated Center for Authorities and Leaders (CIFAL) in Newcastle, Australia, organized an interim workshop as part of the project ‘Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges to Safe Building Codes for Disaster Resilience in South Asia – the cases of Bangladesh and Nepal’ in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Around 20 participants from Bangladesh and Nepal took part in the workshop.

The workshop is part of a series which includes the project team members from Australia, Bangladesh and Nepal, as well as relevant participants working in the building codes and disaster resilience field. This project sees a team of University of Newcastle researchers exploring the opportunities and challenges of compliance to safe building codes in assuring resilience in the face of disasters. The team, from the School of Architecture and Built Environment, has been successful in winning a competitive research grant from the Japan-based Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) to explore the opportunities and challenges of compliance to safe building codes for disaster resilience in South Asia.

They have partnered with researchers in Dhaka University and BRAC University, Bangladesh and Tribhuvan University, Nepal, to undertake this collaborative research project that spans across the Asia-Pacific region. Looking at specific cases in Bangladesh and Nepal, the team, led by Dr. Ifte Ahmed is exploring the role that safe building codes play in assuring resilience in the face of the frequent disasters that affect these countries and to understand how these codes might be more widely adopted to reduce disaster risks. The second day of this trip involved planning for the subsequent stages of the project, and on the third day a field visit outside Dhaka was undertaken, particularly to the site of the Rana Plaza factory building collapse. Planning for the final workshop, which will be held in August 2018 is underway.