Pratibaddha: Living with Landslides Photobook

INTRODUCTION
For families living in the hilly areas of Nepal, the hills provide livelihoods, identity, and a place to call home. But they also bring risks. Every monsoon, communities live with the threat that a landslide could dramatically alter their future overnight. Homes, farms, schools, roads, and entire settlements are built upon deep seated landslide, that can be triggered easily with natural or human induced factors. Behind every statistic is a story of resilience, a community coming together to create a safer future. This photo book is a collection of those stories.
These pages document the journey of the communities living with landslides partnering with PRATIBADDHA project; a commitment to strengthening disaster preparedness, reducing landslide risk, and supporting communities to better live with landslide through locally led early action efforts.

In 2020, PRATIBADDHA Phase I worked alongside communities in Sindhupalchowk and Dolakha, who were still struggling to relocate and reconstruct post 2015 earthquake, to better understand earthquake induced landslide risks and build linkages with governmental plans and policies. Communities and the local government (LG) gained knowledge, skills, and tools to identify hazards, plan emergencies, and strengthen their resilience while gaining access to governmental grants for relocation and reconstruction.

Building on these achievements, Phase II expanded to Sindhupalchowk and Rasuwa, placing vulnerable households at the center of preparedness and early action efforts. Families living in high-risk areas were supported to relocate to safer places through access to weather services, facilitation for locally led solutions for water and slope management systems, and access to government support mechanisms. At the same time, LGs strengthened their disaster preparedness and response systems, ensuring that risk reduction became part of long-term development planning.

Since 2024, PRATIBADDHA Phase III was scaled to the western provinces of Nepal, that is at risk of 500 years of seismic gap: Lumbini, Karnali, and Sudurpashchim. Through a whole-of-society approach, the project worked with communities, governments at all tiers, women, youth, marginalized groups, and other stakeholders to strengthen leadership, preparedness, and early action for landslides, and other hazards. The vision of the fourth cycle of the project, PRATIBADDHA Phase IV, to be implemented until 2028, is not only to reduce disaster risk, but also to foster shared ownership and strengthen subnational government leadership in institutionalising and scaling multi-hazard disaster management systems and response mechanisms.
The photographs in this book offer glimpses far more than project activities. They reveal determination in the face of uncertainty, collective action during times of crisis, and hope for a safer and prosperous future while living with the landslides.

As you turn these pages, we invite you to look beyond the hazards and see the strength, courage, and spirit of the people who call Nepal's hills home. Their stories remind us that resilience is not simply engineered through expert knowledge; it emerges from collective action of people.