The Comprehensive Cadastre Supports Recovery from Disaster
Jurg Kaufmann
Disasters happen. They can be presumed, but not prognosticated. And the effects of disasters in most cases cause heavy changes to the existing situation of land, nature, environment and living space. They provoke as well the need to restore destroyed infrastructures. In most cases this restora-tion must be conform to the legal situation. If it is not known any more what was the legal situation before the disaster, recovery will be difficult and delayed. You cannot restore buildings without knowing the legal situation of property, you cannot develop land when you don?t know how the physical planning was foreseen. You cannot restore infrastructures when the information about the type, nature and position is missing or destroyed. These questions became urgent in every case we know. So the recovery from earthquakes in Haiti, Christchurch, Iran, the Tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia and Japan, was hampered by lack of in-formation about how was the legal situation before the disaster. If this information about the legal situation existing in the disaster area is available, restoration can start as soon as the victims are accommodated and the appreciation of the situation is made. The tool to support an immediate recovery is the comprehensive cadastre as it was stipulated by FIG under the title cadastre 2014 and further developed by the FIG task force on the Spatially Ena-bled Society. The paper shows what a Comprehensive Cadastre is and how it can be established. Based on the example of the Cadastre of Public-law Restrictions on landownership (PLR-cadastre) as it is now under construction in Switzerland, a characteristic and a roadmap is presented and the expected contribution of the Comprehensive Cadastre to disaster recovery is illustrated.
Event: FIG Working Week 2016 : Recovery from Disaster
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