Do Disaster Literacy and Mitigation Policy Affected Residents Resettling in Tsunami Prone Areas? Study from the City of Banda Aceh, Indonesia .

• Main Author: Khairunnisa Khairunnisa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Muhammadiyah University Press 2021-07-01
• Series: Forum Geografi
• Subjects: disaster literacy, mitigation policy, disaster risk map and disaster risk index
• Online Access: https://journals.ums.ac.id/index.php/fg/article/view/11510
• ISSN: 0852-0682; 2460-3945

It has been a decade and half since the tsunami took place in Aceh back in 2004, in which half of the city of Banda Aceh was destroyed. However, the tsunami prone area has regained density with household and communities despite the effort of the local government to socialize the disaster literacy and mitigation policy. Have these policies affected people in their decision to resettling the prone area?  This has become the issue in this study. The study is aimed to examine and analyse disaster literacy and mitigation policies towards the residents’ decision to occupy a post-disaster area in Banda Aceh. By employing quantitative approach and utilising random sampling technique, set of questionnaires were distributed among 225 samples (household) across 5 sub-districts in the tsunami red-zone area. Analysed with SPSS, adopting multiple linear regression technique, the outcome indicated that disaster literacy had positively significant affect (p value=0.000, β=0.410) while the mitigation policies are not statistically significant to affect residents’ decision to resettle in disaster-prone areas. As the tsunami area remained vulnerable, thus, as policy recommendation, the Local Government is encouraged to be more active in disseminating the understanding of mitigation policies (implication of disaster risk index and disaster risk map) extensively, so that the objectives of the existence of mitigation policies might be significantly materialized.