The TRGS project is an on-going research project of LESTARI UKM, granted by the Ministry of Education Malaysia. The title of the research project is "Disaster resilient structural design for urban and rural cultural landscapes of Pahang River Basin."

Floods affect many people by destroying their houses, properties and livelihoods.

 

The anthropogenic development activities even transform natural Pahang River Basin into a rapidly changing anthropogenic landscape. This ongoing rapid transformation make this river basin prone to disasters and people living in this river basin and flood plains become more vulnerable. With the increasing of more anthropogenic development activities and infrastructural settlements, peoples' vulnerabilities also increasing regardless their socio-economic and cultural condition. In fact, the rural and urban settings and infrastructures varies at a great deal and so on their types of vulnerabilities. Therefore, the traditional disaster mitigation measures mostly found ineffective and failed to serve for the long run. It is therefore important to design for innovative structures or planning to mitigate disasters like floods for long lasting period. In the case of rural area, the culture of farming and slope protection management by planting indigenous crops and plants which is a part of flood resilience have since eroded. The local communities within peninsular Malaysia including Pekan have very little skills to exploit the vast benefits of bamboos which are now known to be useful in flood mitigation and adaptation. There is also a lack of understanding about the usefulness of bamboo among government bodies and local voluntary organisations for disaster preparedness and prevention. Therefore bamboo has not been incorporated in regulations and policies pertaining to flood disaster management.

Up to the point, several literature reviews regarding disaster management has been done and the affected sites have been visited as well. The key performances indices (KPI) we have achieved include:

(i) An assessment of flood evacuation center in Pahang:
-To examine the current condition of evacuation centers, and provide design considerations for authorities for the future evacuation centers
-Analyze and overlap information with the GIS group to produce a flood risk map for particular areas

(ii) A prototype for post disaster temporary house, built by bamboo
-Jointing system for bamboo were made manually and had shown in a 1:1 scale bamboo stool

(iii) Bamboo workshop (Stakeholder Engagement)
- To advocate the idea of bamboo cultivation that leads to improvement of slope stability, strengthen community resilient
- To engage with local bamboo players, NGOs and stakeholders