Understanding the opportunities and challenges of compliance to safe building codes for disaster resilience in South Asia
The intent of this project was to explore the opportunities and challenges of how compliance to voluntary safe building codes can be facilitated in the current contexts of Bangladesh and Nepal (Figures 1 and 2) for increased disaster resilience in South Asia, focusing on two countries of the region: Bangladesh and Nepal. Recent disasters in both countries highlighted that one of the significant causes of the problem lies in non-compliance to building codes. Such disasters have brought institutional and community awareness of the importance of safe building codes, presenting an opportunity to explore barriers and enablers to compliance. Building codes do exist in the two countries, but compliance is generally lacking or limited, especially in the widespread informal building sector. The informal building sector engages in construction which lacks code compliance due to a deficiency in the understanding of or limited access to the codes and/or economic pressures. Thus this project addressed the need for understanding how these codes might be more widely adopted to enable disaster resilience.