Urban Hazards Management: A Case Study of Langat River Basin, Peninsular Malaysia

The escalating impact of the disasters that occur in urban areas requires significant attention and planning in order to minimize vulnerability and disaster risk. However, efforts made to minimize disaster risk involves various disciplines, and can be viewed from numerous perspectives that need to be addressed in an integrated manner, and then effectively formulated to provide long term benefit. With the great potential of the GIS, incorporating both the physical and social aspects associated with disasters to reduce vulnerability will form a comprehensive disaster management operation. Therefore, this study aims to translate various hazardous information that is physical and socio-economic in nature into a comparable layer within a GIS platform to assess the study area in an integrated manner. We have conducted a study in the Upper-Langat river basin, Peninsular Malaysia, which has been experiencing numerous disasters including floods and landslides. A hazard assessment was conducted to: systemize the intricacy of the geo-data, identify the predisposing and triggering factors associated with natural hazards, and integrate them spatially to derive multi-hazards data for effective hazard management. The findings revealed that spatially explicit data and maps at the relevant scale based on the surface and subsurface information, integrated with socio-economic vulnerabilities, provide better results that might be beneficial for multi-disaster risk reduction operations. It is also evident that the GIS has the sufficient capacity to translate various physical, compositional, and socio-economic aspects to the comparable outputs. Such spatially explicit products will expedite the decision making process for disaster risk reduction operations.