Environmental Planning for Disaster Management by using GIS-An Overview

Geographical Information System (GIS) with its inherent capabilities of handling spatial and non-spatial datasets, topographic analysis tools and generation of real time models will play crucial role in almost all phases of emergency management activities right from the preventive measures to disaster recovery processes. The disaster might not have the discrimination between urban and rural community, it will cause destruction in both the communities. But managing the disasters in the rural areas is much more complex than the urban areas. The reasons include unpreparedness, non-availability of required data sets, connectivity issues, unawareness and low intellectual response for the emergency etc. With consideration of these drawbacks in the rural community the disaster management activities will be dealt with more caution to minimize the affects of such natural calamities. This paper focuses on how the disaster can be managed through the understanding of the disaster phenomenon, using of GIS as tool in different phases of the disaster management and building up the awareness and required source data with specific reference to the rural context.