“a book that contains instructions or advice about how to do something or the most important and useful information about a subject” – Cambridge Dictionary.

The handbook is our main deliverable of the project. Our outcome was to enhance the awareness and understanding of local people regarding the landslides and the risks related to them. Raised awareness can help the locals to identify the level of risks in their neighborhood and the ways they could protect themselves.

The handbook, is reflecting two sustainable development goals

• SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, is related to improving the safety and resilience of cities and communities, and its sub-target 11.5 focuses on reducing the amount of affected people and loss of lives caused by disasters
• SDG 13, Climate Action with its sub-target 13.1 aims at improving the resilience and ability to adapt to natural hazards caused by climate change

The direct beneficiaries of our project were the JNEC student team and the staff in JNEC with whom we were collaborating during our project as well as the local students. We believed that it was most beneficial to have the local students as our handbook’s target audience, since we were focusing on the educational purpose. The illiteracy rate in Bhutan was high, hence, they were the potential group that can use and disseminate our results further to better reach our final beneficiaries – the local people of Dewathang, Bhutan.

The handbook includes general information on landslides with infographics and the landslide susceptibility map made by the Bhutanese team as a core mainly for educational purposes. The handbook was first written in English with tailored information to fit the local people. After a discussion with the JNEC team, the translation into local language – Dzongkha is not necessary at the moment, however, there is a possibility to be translated afterwards if needed. The handbook was designed to be as visual as possible, as pictures are a great way to convey this type of information. The illiteracy rate in the study area was an issue, therefore, to make the handbook accessible, the material was made to be simple, with a limitation of text.

The handbook is planned to have 16 pages in the size of A4. This is the content and structure of the handbook, which includes:

• What is a landslide?
• Basic landslide types
• The causes of landslides:
  • Natural Occurrences
  • Human Activities
• Where/when do Landslides occur? (signs of landslides)
• Effects and Consequences of Landslides: on People, on Built Environment, on Natural Environment
• Simple Mitigation/Prevention Techniques
• How to prepare for a landslide?
• What to do in case of a landslide?
• The landslide zoning map
• Pictures of past landslides
• Contact information under emergency: who is responsible for the emergency management of landslide hazards in Dewathang? 

Above is the landslide susceptibility map of Dewathang Gewog made by the Bhutanese students. The landslide susceptibility is divided into 5 levels from very low chance to very high chance. With this map, it can be clearly seen where the area with higher chance of landslides is.

The handbook was in the finalizing process that finished by the early of June. The handbook is going to be distributed in an electronic form and possibly in hard copies to JNEC.