Disaster Resilience in Industrial, Business, Commercial, and Investment Sectors

Sector of industry, business, and commerce shall be concisely setting up the systems of manufacturing, logistic, as well as stringent monitoring system to achieve standard and legal compliance. Moreover, capital cost, interest, and investment feasibility shall be considered under disastrous situation due to direct and direct impact of the situation to the sector as follows.

• Building, facilities, instruments, equipment, machines could be damaged and unusable for production.
• Structural damage might impact continuously such as leakage of waste, wastewater, chemical, radioactive, hazardous material, including fire hazard from electrical short.
• Products and raw material are damaged. Raw material sources are affected and consequently cause raw material shortage in the production pipeline. In case that victimized company is the raw material supplier, this could be a reason for raw material shortage in other areas, other suppliers, and also the customers

Accordingly, it is essential to analyse and precisely plan prior to any operation at every step; to properly ensure feasible investment, measurement, management, and reduction of risks.

Disaster resilience measures

1. Prevention and Mitigation Measure
   1. Structural measure
      1. Ensuring standardized construction of the factory and organization
      2. Improving building structure to withstand flooding (in high flooding risk area) by constructing ground floor with water way
      3. Constructing of flooding prevention line for the activities in high flooding risk area. However, constructing such prevention line around industrial estate might worsen flooding situation in surrounding area; therefore, area exploration and risk assessment should be achieved with surrounding communities and agriculturalists to finalize the solution together (e.g. construction of detention basin for using water in drought season).
   2. Non-Structural Measure
      1. Utilizatiing green production technology to save energy consumption, reduce waste and pollutant, and prevent leaked contaminant in case of disaster.
      2. Establishing standardized wastewater treatment system with anti-leaking measure
      3. Establishing firefighting system and chemical spilt prevention system
      4. Establishing and enforcing safety standard in organization with regular monitoring
      5. Encouraging disaster risk assessment to be part of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
2. Preparedness Measure
   1. Adaptation
      1. Sourcing for spared raw material or business matching with the company producing same product category, in order to deliver product to the customer on time in case of operational shutting down during disaster situation
   2. Disaster Preparedness
      1. Ensuring continual production system and spared machine
      2. Ensuring multi-location of warehouses and distribution centers for continuous operation in case that one location is under disastrous situation
      3. Establishing incident prevention and mitigation plan with regular training for employees
      4. Establishing efficient communication system and reserved communication channel under emergency situation and ensuring regular supplier communication
      5. Preparing for emergency logistic route in case of unavailable main route
      6. Ensuring reserved information system to prevent loss under disastrous situation
      7. Planning for continual business operation in short period of time
      8. Applying insurance for facilities and organization including health and life insurance for employees
      9. Preparing control and mitigation measures for suppliers who take advantage of consumers during periods of supply shortages after crises, and punitive measures
      10. Developing an agreement between the public and private sector on collaboration in various areas during emergencies, such as heavy machines, excavation machines, lighting generator machines, expertise, etc.

Business stakeholders

Entrepreneurs/communities/government agencies and others.

Since risk is one of the crucial parameters for business, the risk assessment shall be conduct thoughtfully to ensure the worth of investment. Besides, the conducting the risk assessment regularly results in better risk reduction scheme. The samples of disaster risk reduction activities for business sector show in Table 1.

Table 1: Example of business activities for disaster risk reduction

Example 1: Business Continuity Management: SCG (Thailand)

The Siam Cement Public Company Limited – SCG has implemented the Business Continuity Management (BCM) since 2000 due to the political demonstration. The aim of the approach is to maintain business operation and build up its liability in response to crisis. Under the Business Continuity Plan: BCP, dedicated employee will actively respond to monitor, assess the situation and plan the response. During the flood in 2011, BCM team arranged mobile office to keep the business running. Meantime, the team arranged the schemes to help their employee absorb the flood impacts (DDMP, 2014).

Active response of SCG employees; Picture source: Cheechern, Hathaipat, 2014 and Siam Cement Group

Example #2: Rainwater harvesting tank in the department store (International)

A department store in the Philippines called ‘SM City Masinag’ is located in the high flooding risk area. In order prevent the damage, the water storage tank was designed to harvest the stormwater from building’s roof and drainage system when the typhoon hits. The tank with 150,000 cubic meters can prevent the flood both inside and outside of the building. In addition, it can reduce water consumption cost in normal operating condition (DDMP, 2014).

There are other sectors; infrastructure; education; public health; and residential, that can implement the disaster risk abatement measures. Further information of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Guideline, Please visit Disaster Risk Reduction Guideline.

Source:

• การลดความเสี่ยงจากภัยพิบัติ สู่การพัฒนาที่ยั่งยืน, 2013, Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, Ministry of Interior (Thai language)
• DDMP. 2014. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) for sustainable development. http://www.undp.org/content/dam/thailand/docs/หนังสือการลดความเสี่ยงจากภัยพิบัติสู่การพัฒนาที่ยั่งยืน_DRRGuideline.pdf