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PREFACE

Over the years, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada has been supporting the incorporation of information systems for urban environmental decision-making in municipalities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. This research conducted by the Faculty of Science of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, was initially conceived for the purpose of managing new events posing urban environmental risks. Within this context, the research outcomes were enhanced with the production of a tool to support integrated risk and urban vulnerability management in case of natural disasters, the so-called Integrated Municipal Environmental Management System (Sistema Integrado para la Gestión Ambiental Municipal – SIGA, in Spanish).

SIGA was intended for local use and is geared to facilitate the advisory task of municipal technical experts, decision makers, members of civil society and land use planners. This tool is based on a methodological integrated management approach that incorporates social and environmental factors to the basic physical variables that describe the territory under study.

In this manual, the authors of the tool have synthesized the learning provided by SIGA users themselves, as well as the results of the knowledge exchanged during different face-to-face and distance training courses carried out for municipal experts in the different sub-regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, within the framework of the former Environmental Management Secretariat (EMS) of IDRC.

Based on the application of geographic information systems (GIS) fundamentals, this manual describes the steps to be taken and the materials to be used to set up an information system that allows municipal technical experts and decision makers to identify, diagnose and map vulnerability and risk areas in a given municipal territory, by building simple indicators that help monitor the evolution of these events.

This version of the SIGA manual incorporates the economic factor into local risk management planning, which allows decision makers to define municipal priorities and availability of resources and thus enhance planning processes relative to Investment in Prevention and Mitigation at the Municipal level (IPMM in Spanish). It also makes it possible to identify opportunities to complement strategies relative to social investment, vulnerability and risk reduction and, finally, also enhance participatory processes relative to education and dissemination. Accordingly, SIGA represents a pre-investment endeavour in terms of municipal prevention and mitigation.

As part of the core activities of the Urban Poverty and Environment Programme (UPE) of IDRC, this manual is a contribution to advancing the process for the reduction of factors that exacerbate the poverty-disaster-environmental degradation relation, by strengthening local management capacities in order to increase local resilience to natural disasters.

With this publication, IDRC contributes to the implementation of the tenets and goals set forth in the Kobe World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR), Japan, 2005, aimed at providing communities with greater resilience to face natural disasters.

Walter Ubal Giordano, Senior Programme Specialist
International Development Research Centre - Canada
May 2008

Document(s) 1 de 4