Linking geomorphological features and disaster risk in a school district: The development of an in-service teacher training programme

Abstract The dimension and degree of a disaster can depend on the vulnerability of the location, the people and the community. One of the key lessons learnt from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster was that schools should prepare a school contingency plan in advance. To do so, they should fully understand their school’s disaster risk in the worst-case scenario in order to protect children’s lives at the school. Therefore, schools are required to customise their preparedness measures according to the school’s locality. The training programme, ‘Understanding disaster risk based on geographic features of a school district’ was developed and implemented in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, which was severely affected by the 2011 tsunami. The training programme was a spin-off of a school-based disaster education programme implemented in Ishinomaki City and was expected to support the customisation of schools’ disaster manuals according to the school district’s disaster risk. In order to strengthen teachers’ map-reading skills, the training was organised in three steps. The first step was to enable teachers to acquire basic map-reading skills and read a contour map to understand the geomorphological features of their school district. The second step was to have teachers compare these maps to hazard maps (for tsunamis, floods and landslides) to understand the links between geomorphological features and disaster risk. The third step was to have them identify emergency evacuation sites and evacuation shelters for each hazard type in their school district. It was found that the training helped to increase the participants’ confidence in understanding these maps.