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.

灾难的规模和程度可能取决于地点、人员和社区的脆弱性。从 2011 年东日本大地震灾难中吸取的重要教训之一是学校应提前制定学校应急计划。为此，他们应该充分了解学校在最坏情况下的灾害风险，以保护学校儿童的生命。因此，学校需要根据学校所在的地区来定制他们的准备措施。在受 2011 年海啸严重影响的宫城县石卷市制定并实施了“基于学区地理特征了解灾害风险”的培训计划。该培训计划是石卷市实施的以学校为基础的灾害教育计划的衍生项目，预计将支持根据学区的灾害风险定制学校的灾害手册。为了加强教师的地图阅读能力，培训分三个步骤进行。第一步是让教师掌握基本的地图阅读技能并阅读等高线图以了解其学区的地貌特征。第二步是让教师将这些地图与灾害地图（海啸、洪水和山体滑坡）进行比较，以了解地貌特征与灾害风险之间的联系。第三步是让他们为学区内的每种危险类型确定紧急疏散地点和疏散避难所。