Dr. Mark Bynoe, senior environment and resource economist with the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC). Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Apr 30 2017 (IPS)

Climate change remains inextricably linked to the challenges of disaster risk reduction (DRR). And according to the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Robert Glasser, the reduction of greenhouse gases is “the single most urgent global disaster risk treatment”.

Glasser was addressing the Fifth Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in the Americas. Held recently in Montreal, the gathering included more than 1,000 delegates from 50 countries, including the Caribbean.“We see disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation as two sides of the same coin." --Dr. Mark Bynoe

“We recognise that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is arguably the single most urgent global disaster risk treatment, because without those efforts our other efforts to reduce many hazards and the risks those pose to communities would be overwhelmed over the longer term,” Glasser said.

The conference, hosted by the Canadian government in cooperation with UNISDR marked the first opportunity for governments and stakeholders of the Americas to discuss and agree on a Regional Action Plan to support the implementation of the Sendai Framework for DRR 2015-2030.

The Sendai Framework is the first major agreement of the post-2015 development agenda, with seven targets and four priorities for action. It was endorsed by the UN General Assembly following the 2015 Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR). The Framework is a 15-year, voluntary non-binding agreement which recognises that the state has the primary role to reduce disaster risk but that responsibility should be shared with other stakeholders including local government, the private sector and other stakeholders.

“The regional plan of action you will adopt . . . will help and guide national and local governments in their efforts to strengthen the links between the 2030 agenda for Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction as national and local DRR strategies are developed and further refined in line with the Sendai Framework priorities over the next four years,” Glasser said.

The Caribbean is a minute contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions but will be among the most severely impacted.

The region is already experiencing its impacts with more frequent extreme weather events such as the 2013 rain event in the Eastern Caribbean, extreme drought across the region with severe consequences in several countries; the 2005 flooding in Guyana and Belize in 2010.

Inaction for the Caribbean region is very costly. An economic analysis focused on three areas – increased hurricane damages, loss of tourism revenue and infrastructure – revealed damages could cost the region 10.7 billion dollars by 2025. That’s more than the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all the member countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

At the Montreal conference, Head of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) Ronald Jackson was a panelist in a forum discussing the linkages between disaster risk reduction, climate change and sustainable development. He said the region needs to marry its indigenous solutions to disaster risk management with modern technology.

“We’ve recognised that in the old days, our fore parents…had to deal with flood conditions and they survived them very well. There were simple things in terms of how they pulled their beds and other valuables out of the flood space in the house in particular. This contributed to their surviving the storms with minimal loss,” Jackson said.

“That knowledge of having to face those adverse conditions and surviving them and coping through them and being able to bounce back to where they were before, that was evident in our society in the past. It has subsequently disappeared.”

CDEMA is a regional inter-governmental agency for disaster management in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). The Agency was established in 1991 with primary responsibility for the coordination of emergency response and relief efforts to participating states that require such assistance.

Another regional agency, the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) is collaborating with other agencies on the Caribbean Risk Management Initiative (CRMI).

The CRMI aims to provide a platform for sharing the experiences and lessons learned between different sectors across the Caribbean in order to facilitate improved disaster risk reduction.

“We see disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation as two sides of the same coin because to the extent we are able to enhance disaster risk reduction we are also beginning to adapt to climate change,” Dr. Mark Bynoe, the CCCCC’s senior environment and resource economist said.

He explained that there are a range of activities carried out specifically in terms of climate adaptation that will also have a disaster risk reduction element.

“We are looking at enhancing water security within a number of our small island states. One of the things we are focusing on there is largely to produce quality water through the use of reverse osmosis systems but we’re utilizing a renewable energy source. So, on the one hand we are also addressing adaptation and mitigation.”

Meantime, CCCCC’s Deputy Executive Director Dr. Ulric Trotz said the agency is rolling out a series of training workshops in 10 countries to share training tools that were developed with the aim of assisting in the generation of scientific information and analysis to help in making informed decisions. These include the Weather Generator (WG), the Tropical Storm Model/ Simple Model for the Advection of Storms and Hurricanes (SMASH), and the Caribbean Drought Assessment Tool (CARiDRO).

The training will target key personnel whose focus are in areas of agriculture, water resources, coastal zone management, health, physical planning or disaster risk reduction.

“The CARIWIG [Caribbean Weather Impacts Group] tool is a critical tool in that it more or less localizes the projection so that for instance, you can actually look at climate projections for the future in a watershed in St. Kitts and Nevis. It localizes that information and it makes it much more relevant to the local circumstance,” said Dr. Trotz.

Training and application of the tools will allow decision-makers to better understand the potential impacts of drought, tropical storms, and rainfall and temperature changes. When combined with other data and information, they can help to build a picture of potential impacts to key economic sectors in the various countries.

By Desmond Brown
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Apr 30 2017 (IPS)

Climate change remains inextricably linked to the challenges of disaster risk reduction (DRR). And according to the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Robert Glasser, the reduction of greenhouse gases is “the single most urgent global disaster risk treatment”.

Glasser was addressing the Fifth Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in the Americas. Held recently in Montreal, the gathering included more than 1,000 delegates from 50 countries, including the Caribbean.
Head of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) Ronald Jackson, who was a panelist in a forum discussing the linkages between disaster risk reduction, climate change and sustainable development, said the region needs to marry its indigenous solutions to disaster risk management with modern technology.

The veranda of a house which has been used to provide shelter for four families, including the family of retiree Dania de la Cruz. In the eastern Cuban city of Baracoa, 167 people are still living in shelters after Hurricane Matthew destroyed their homes in October 2016. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
BARACOA, Cuba, Mar 23 2017 (IPS)

Clearings with fallen trees in the surrounding forests, houses still covered with tarpaulins and workers repairing the damage on the steep La Farola highway are lingering evidence of the impact of Hurricane Matthew four months ago, in the first city built by the Spanish conquistadors in Cuba.

Baracoa, a 505-year-old world heritage city in eastern Cuba, located in a vulnerable area between the coast, mountains and the rivers that run across it, is showing signs of fast recovery of its infrastructure, thanks in part to the application of its own formulas to overcome the effects of the Oct. 4-5, 2016 natural disaster.

“The ways sought to deal with the situation have been different, innovative. Necessity led us to involve the local population in addressing a phenomenon which affected more than 90 per cent of the homes,” said Esmeralda Cuza, head of the office in charge of the recovery effort in the people’s council of Majubabo, an outlying neighborhood along the coast.

Standing next to a mural announcing the delivery of bottles of water donated to the families affected by the hurricane, the 64-year-old public official, with experience in dealing with disasters since 1982, told IPS that “more local solutions were sought” before, during and after Hurricane Matthew hit the province of Guantánamo.

Internationally renowned for its effectiveness in protecting human lives during climate disasters, Cuba’s disaster management model is also undergoing changes within the current reforms carried out by the government of Raúl Castro, which includes local responses during the evacuation of local residents and the rebuilding process.

“We had some experience in this, but never with the magnitude and organisational level of this one,” said Cuza, referring to what the strongest hurricane in the history of Guantánamo meant for this city.

Workers unload materials for the reconstruction of a building damaged by Hurricane Matthew, on the seaside promenade of the historic city of Baracoa, in the eastern province of Guantánamo, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In a city where most houses have lightweight roofs, the hurricane wreaked havoc in 24,104 of the 27,000 houses in the municipality of Baracoa, population of 81,700.

The local government reports that 3,529 homes were totally destroyed, 3,764 were partially destroyed, 10,126 lost their roofs, and 6,685 suffered partial damage to the roofs.

This figure does not include multi-family buildings that were also damaged. One of these, located on the seafront, is waiting to be demolished. In addition, 525 government buildings were affected, as well as the power and communication networks, water pies, roads and bridges.

Authorities say 85 per cent of the city has been restored, including 17, 391 houses that have been repaired.

“At least here all the houses have roofs,” said Cuza, talking about the restoration of the 1,153 damaged houses in Majubabo. In the rest of Baracoa, 90 per cent of the damaged roofs were fixed, and you can still see some houses with no roofs or covered with tarpaulins on a drive through the city.

Like everyone else, the office headed by Cuza is waiting for more materials to finish restoring the damaged interior of the houses.

In the case of homes that were completely destroyed, authorities provided the so-called “temporary housing facility“, which consists of basic construction materials. With this support and salvaged materials, 3,466 families rebuilt part of their homes to be able to leave the shelters and shared houses where they were initially placed.

The remains of boats and bushes destroyed by Hurricane Matthew scattered on a beach in Baracoa bear witness to the violence of the biggest climate disaster ever to hit the province of Guantánamo, in eastern Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

This set of measures seems to be the reason for the rapid improvement in the city´s landscape, through which foreign tourists stroll. With painted facades and big signboards, the 283 rental houses and state-run tourist facilities have been operating since early November, when high season started.

Some parts of the seafront promenade are still impassable while workers fix the two-kilometre wall, which barely defended the city from the waves. Because of their vulnerability to the sea, 21 coastal communities are to be relocated before 2030, including Baracoa.

“The construction materials programme was launched to respond to the demand,“ said Rodolfo Frómeta, who is in charge of the state-run company that groups 12 small factories of natural rock materials and blocks, which plans to produce earthquake-resistant concrete slabs for roofs this month.

Baracoa has the largest number of these factories, which also operate in the affected neighbouring municipalities of Imías and Maisí. Up to February, the 22 factories in the area had produced 227,500 blocks, using artisanal moulds and rocks collected from the surrounding land and surface quarries.

“We only import the cement and steel,” said Frómeta, referring to the factories, of which three are state-run and the rest are private. “But all of them receive government support, like these mills that grind stones,“ he told IPS in Áridos Viera, a company in Mabujabo.

A psychologist by profession, Amaury Viera founded in 2015 this private enterprise, with the aim of turning it into a cooperative. Eight workers obtain sand, granite, gravel and stone powder. “Our main activity now is making blocks, some 800 a day, although we want to increase that to 1,200,“ said Viera.

With his bag full of tools, the young bricklayer and carpenter Diolnis Silot is heading home for lunch. “I have worked in the construction of 35 houses since Matthew, two were fully rebuilt and the rest involved replacing lightweight roofs. Most of them received state subsidies,” he told IPS.

Rodolfo Frómeta, in charge of the state company that groups 12 small local factories of natural rocky materials and blocks, next to a stone mill, near the city of Baracoa in eastern Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

A few metres away, the owner of a private cafeteria, Yudelmis Navarro, is installing a new window and making other improvements to his house. “The hurricane carried away the roof and some things from indoors. The government replaced the roof for free and now I am doing the smaller-scale repairs at my own expense,“ he said.

“People who expect everything for free will not solve very much,“ Navarro said.

On crutches, retiree Dania de la Cruz, one of the 167 people still living in shelters in the municipality, watches people going home for lunch, from the doorway of the large house where she lives with her daughter and three other families. “I used to live with my daughter along the Duaba river, on a farm, where I lost almost everything. I won’t go back there. We don’t know when or where we will have our new house,” she said.

“The longest-lasting damages were in agriculture and housing,” said Luis Sánchez, the mayor of Baracoa. He stressed that the recovery strategy included modernising the new infrastructure and making it more resistant, for example in communications.

So far, he said, 3,900 low-interest bank loans were approved for people to rebuild their homes, in addition to 700 subsidies, and more than 10,000 allowances for low-income families. Some families paid for the rebuilding out of their own pocket.

“And we have gained experience in evacuation,“ said Sánchez, who mentioned the use of traditional shelters in caves and rural buildings known as “varas en tierra” made of wood and thatched roofs that reach all the way to the ground.

A couple wait on an overturned garbage bin to be rescued by boat during the Chennai flooding of December 2015. Credit: R. Samuel/IPS

By Jency Samuel
CHENNAI, India, Oct 19 2016 (IPS)

“The rain was our nemesis as well as our saviour,” says Kanniappan, recalling the first week of December 2015 when Chennai was flooded.

“Kind neighbours let us stay in the upper floors of their houses as the water levels rose. The rainwater was also our only source of drinking water,” he added.“Urban planners value land, not water.” -- Sushmita Sengupta of the Centre for Science and Environment

Kalavathy, another resident, isn’t very familiar with the links between extreme weather events and climate change. All she knows is that in December, her house was completely submerged in 15 feet of water. Now, after working night shifts, she gets up at 4am to pump water, supplied by the administration during fixed timings.

The simple lives of Kalavathy and her neighbours, who live in row houses behind the 15-foot-high wall built on the embankment of Adyar River, seem to revolve around water. Either too much or too little.

Chennai, the capital city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, literally became an island in December 2015. The airport was inundated. Trains and flights had to be cancelled, cutting off the city for a few days from the rest of India.

The Chennai floods claimed more than 500 lives and economic losses were pegged at 7.4 billion dollars, with similar figures for all flood-affected Indian cities.

Urban flooding in India and other countries is one of the issues being discussed at the Habitat III meeting in Quito, Ecuador this week. The Indian government has also released a draft for indicators of what a “Smart City” would look like.

Extreme weather events

Incessant rains also left Chennai  inundated in November. “The average rainfall for Chennai in November is 407.4 mm, but in 2015 it was 1218.6 mm. For December, the average rainfall is 191 mm, whereas in December 2015 it was 542 mm, breaking a 100-year-old rainfall record,” said G.P. Sharma of Skymet Weather Services Pvt Ltd.

While the extreme rainfall that Chennai experienced was attributed to El Nino, scientists predict that with climate change, extreme weather events will increase. “There will be more rain spread over fewer days, as happened in Chennai in 2015, Kashmir in 2014, Uttarakhand in 2013,” says Sushmita Sengupta of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based research and advocacy organisation. This concurs with the IPCC fifth assessment report that predicts that India’s rainfall intensity will increase.

Poor urban planning and urban flooding

According to India’s National Institute of Disaster Management, floods are the most recurrent of all disasters, affecting large numbers of people and areas. The Ministry of Home Affairs has identified 23 of the 35 Indian states as flood-prone. It was only after the Mumbai floods of 2005 that the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), a government body, distinguished urban floods as different from riverine floods. The cause of each is different and hence each needs a different control strategy.

The Chennai city administration was ill-prepared to cope with the freak weather, in spite of forecast warnings from Indian Meteorological Department. Jammu & Kashmir had neither a system for forecasting floods nor an exclusive department for disaster management when it was hit by floods in 2014. While a different reason can be attributed for the flooding and its aftermath for each of the Indian cities, the common thread that connects  them is extremely poor urban planning.

As per a report by Bengaluru-based Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), in 1951, there were only five Indian cities with a population of more than one million. In 2011, this number rose to 53. To cater to the increasing population, the built-up area increased, roads were paved and open spaces dwindled.

But an IIHS analysis shows that the built-up area has been increasing disproportionately compared to population growth. Between 2000 and 2010, Kolkata’s population grew by about 7 percent, but its built area by 48 percent. In the same period, Bengaluru’s built area doubled compared to its population, indicating the commercial infrastructural development.

Disappearing urban sponges

The open spaces that disappeared, giving way to concrete structures, are primarily water bodies that act as sponges, soaking up the rainwater. Increasing population also led to increased waste and the cities’ water bodies turned into dumping grounds for municipal solid waste, as was the case with Chennai’s Pallikaranai marshland. They also became sewage carriers like the River Bharalu that flows through Guwahati, Assam.

“Urban planners value land, not water,” says Sengupta.

A 1909 map of Chennai shows a four-mile-long lake in the centre of the city. It exists now only in street names such as Tank Bund Road and Tank View Road. T.K. Ramkumar, a member of the Expert Committee on Pallikaranai appointed by the Madras High Court, told IPS that in the 1970s, the government filled up lakes within the city and developed housing plots under ‘eri schemes’, eri in Tamil meaning lakes.

In fact eris are a series of cascading tanks, where water overflowing from a tank flows to the next and so on till the excess water reaches the Bay of Bengal. But the marsh and the feeder channels have been blocked by buildings, leading to frequent floods. NDMA suggests that urbanisation of watersheds causes increased flow of water in natural drains and hence the drains should be periodically widened. Not only are the water courses not widened, but heavily encroached upon.

Encroachment of water bodies is a pan-India problem. The water spread of all its cities have been declining rapidly over the years. “Of the 262 lakes recorded in Bengaluru in the 1960s, only ten have water. 65 of Ahmedabad’s 137 lakes have made way for buildings,” says Chandra Bhushan of CSE. Statistics reveal that the more a city’s water spread loss, the more the number of floods it has experienced.

Way forward

After the Chennai floods, the government-appointed Parliamentary Standing Committee demanded strict action against encroachments. It directed the Tamil Nadu administration to clear channels and river beds to enable water to flow, to improve drainage networks and to develop vulnerability indices by creating a calamity map. The Committee’s direction applies equally well to all the cities.

The Indian government has allocated 164 million dollars to restore 63 water bodies under its Lakes and Wetlands Conservation Program. But urban flood statistics reveal that the efforts need to be speeded up.

Yet in the Draft Indian Standard for Smart Cities Indicator, there is no indicator to measure the disaster preparedness and resilience of a city.

“Catchment areas and feeder channels should be declared ecologically sensitive and should be protected by stringent laws,” says Sengupta.

As for Chennai, “The retention capacity of Pallikaranai should be enhanced by suitable methods after hydrological and hydrogeological studies says,” said Dr. Indumathi M. Nambi of the Indian Institute of Technology.

She adds that the Buckingham Canal should be connected to the sea to facilitate discharge during floods. Plans are afoot to demonstrate this with the cooperation of industries and NGOs.

The plans are sure to work as Jaipur has created a successful public-private partnership model. Mansagar Lake, which had turned into a repository of sewage, received 70 percent funding from the central government for restoration. The state government raised the balance with the help of the tourism industry by allocating space for entertainment and hospitality spots, successfully restoring the lake.

The restoration of water bodies and flood mitigation measures will need to be site-specific, taking the extent and topographical conditions of catchment area, existing and proposed storm water drains, status of embankments and bunds of water bodies and permeability of soil conditions into account. But with such measures and political will, experts believe the safety of inhabitants and urban resilience can be accomplished.

Hurricane Sandy floods a street in Lindenhurst, Long Island. Credit: Jason DeCrow/CC BY SA/2.5

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jul 28 2015 (IPS)

Although four in 10 adults have never heard the phrase “climate change,” many are aware that something is amiss with local weather patterns, a new survey covering 119 countries has found.

Published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, the study based on Gallup poll results found that worldwide, a person’s level of education is the single strongest predictor of climate change awareness.

And understanding that the problem is “anthropogenic” – caused by humans, rather than being a naturally occurring phenomenon – increases the personal perception of risk.

This was particularly true in Latin America and Europe, whereas perception of local temperature change was the strongest predictor in many African and Asian countries.

It found that awareness of the problem was very uneven. Two-thirds of people in Egypt, Bangladesh and Nigeria, for instance, had never heard of climate change, while in North America, Europe, and Japan, more than 90 percent of the public is aware of it.

This highlights the need to develop tailored climate communication strategies for individual nations, the study says. It suggests that improving basic education, climate literacy, and public understanding of the local dimensions of climate change are vital to public engagement and support for climate action.

“If you don’t know you’re at risk, you’re even more at risk because you can’t possibly be taking the actions to prepare,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, told Time.

In the United States, the study found the political party affiliation and ideology were also strong predictors of views on climate change.

“[For Americans] just having higher education does not mean that you understand or accept the science,” Leiserowitz said. “[Americans] who have attained higher education are better at cherry picking evidence that seems to validate what we already believe.”

But the deniers may be in for a wake-up call. The same issue of Nature Climate Change also warned that a triple threat of sea-level rise, storm surges, and heavy rainfall pose an increasing risk to residents of major U.S. cities including Boston, New York, Houston, San Diego, and San Francisco.

With nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population residing in coastal counties, the paper warns, “[i]mpacts of flooding in these usually low-lying, densely populated, and highly developed regions, can be devastating with wide-ranging social, economic, and environmental consequences.”

A World Bank study two years ago warned that by 2050, flood damage in the world’s coastal cities could reach a trillion dollars a year as sea levels rise and global warming triggers more extreme weather.

More than 40 percent of these costs could fall upon just four cities – New Orleans, Miami and New York in the U.S. and Guangzhou in China.

Andrea Thompson of Climate Centrals explains it this way: “The wall of ocean water that the winds of a storm system, such as a hurricane, can push in front of it can combine with heavy rains to exacerbate flooding in two ways: Either the rainfall inland can ramp up the severity of the surge-driven flooding, or the surge can elevate water levels to the point that gravity-driven flow of rainwater is impeded, causing that water to collect in streets and seep into homes.”

New York City – along with two dozen U.S. states and island nations in the Caribbean – already experienced the catastrophic damage such extreme weather can inflict, when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. It flooded streets, tunnels and subway lines and cut power throughout the city. Damage in the United States alone amounted to 65 billion dollars.

Thomas Wahl, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of South Florida and author of the Nature flood study, said it was “just a starting point” and that he hoped it will prompt city planners and engineers to begin factoring such events into their disaster management plans.

Edited by Thalif Deen

Heavy flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia. Credit: Bigstock

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 2015 (IPS)

Natural disasters have become a fact of life for millions around the world, and the future forecast is only getting worse.

From super typhoons to floods, droughts and landslides, these events tend to widen existing inequalities between and within nations, often leaving the poorest with quite literally nothing."The biggest mistake is that we wait for something to happen before responding to it." -- Chloe Demrovsky

In 2013 alone, three times as many people lost their homes to natural disasters than to war, according to a new policy brief by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

The brief, which recommends incorporating accessible risk insurance into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), frames all this as a human rights issue.

“States and other actors have a duty to protect the human rights of life, livelihood and shelter of their citizens, which can be threatened by natural hazards if exposure is high and resilience low or inadequate,” the brief’s author,  Dr. Ana Gonzalez Pelaez, a fellow at the institute, told IPS.

“Insurance is an essential element in building resilience, and for insurance to operate appropriate supportive regulation needs to be in place.”

She said that at least some of these resources could be allocated as part of the adaptation measures countries will negotiate at the climate talks in Paris in December.

Earlier this month, the G7 promised to insure up to 400 million vulnerable people against risks from climate change. This could be accomplished through a combination of public, private, mutual or cooperative insurance systems.

Tom Herbstein is the programme manager of ClimateWise, whose membership includes 32 leading insurance companies. He says many are actively exploring ways to extend coverage to emerging markets and vulnerable communities.

This includes using long-term weather forecasting to support small-scale agricultural coverage, to the African Risk Capacity, established to help African Union members respond to natural disasters.

“Yet entering such markets poses many challenges,” Herbstein told IPS. “These include distribution models unsuited to high-volume, low premium insurance products; a lack of historical actuarial data; populations struggling to comprehend a financial product one might never derive benefit from; and widespread political and regulatory uncertainties.”

Ultimately, he said, if coverage of poor communities is to be mainstreamed, “an alignment between insurers, political leaders, regulators and other stakeholders will be necessary to help lessen the risks – i.e. costs – associated with entering such new and challenging markets.”

Palaez says that microinsurance is also moving further into the mainstream strategy of major commercial insurers like Alliance and Swiss Re. In January 2015, a consortium of eight global insurance institutions announced the creation of Blue Marble Microinsurance, an entity formed to open markets and deliver risk protection in underserved developing countries.

There have already been success stories. In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in October 2013, CARD MBA of the Philippines paid claims to almost 300,000 customers affected by the catastrophe within five days of the event.

But some disaster experts also emphasise that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And even the best intentions can have lacklustre results.

Haiti is a prime example. More than five years ago, a massive earthquake struck the Caribbean nation, already the poorest in the region, killing more than 230,000 people.

A year later, the Red Cross initiated a multimillion-dollar project called LAMIKA to rebuild damaged or destroyed homes, and amassed nearly half a billion dollars in donations. But according to a recent investigation by ProPublica, only six homes were actually built.

Chloe Demrovsky, executive director of the non-profit Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI), says aiding local communities in the immediate aftermath of a disaster will never be a simple task.

“The biggest mistake is that we wait for something to happen before responding to it,” she told IPS. “Many disasters could be prevented by focusing on preparing our communities in advance. Each disaster event presents unique challenges, so there is no option to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.

“For this reason, the idea of promoting resilience is gaining ground over the traditional approach of disaster risk reduction. Resilience means the ability to bounce back from a shock. The resilience of a community in terms of disaster recovery is dependent on the resources, level of preparedness, and organizational capacity of that community.  Strong communities recover faster.”

She said that the concept of “business continuity” is a key component of building resilient systems.

“Vulnerable communities are always the hardest hit during a large-scale disaster and it is important that the government deploys enough resources quickly enough to help them recover. If the private sector is adequately prepared, that will reduce the government burden and allow them to focus resources on the most adversely affected communities.

“The private sector needs to be included in every stage of the process in order for it to be an asset rather than a potential detractor from the major goals of improving our approach to disaster aid.”

She added that it’s most useful to give cash donations rather than sending material goods, and it is preferable to give to a local organisation rather than a large international organisation with name recognition.

“The local NGO is used to working in that community, understands its unique system, and will be able to more rapidly identify its needs.  Because they are local, they will also remain in the area for the long-term even after the original outpouring of aid begins to dry up,” she pointed out.

“Finally, we need to learn from past experiences and start to prepare for the next disaster before it happens. Many tragedies can be prevented by having a good plan in place. Events happen, but disasters are man-made.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Devastation from the Mar. 1, 2011 tsunami that swept through Yotukura fishing village. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

By Ramesh Jaura
SENDAI, Japan, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has announced a new 10-year global plan to support country efforts to reduce the risk of disasters that kill people and destroy livelihoods. The plan was unveiled at the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction which ended on Mar. 18.

“Called ‘5-10-50’, the programme will support countries and communities to deliver better risk-informed development, and targets 50 countries over 10 years, with a focus on five critical areas: risk awareness and early warning; risk-governance and mainstreaming; preparedness; resilient recovery; and local/urban risk reduction,” UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said at a special event on Mar. 17 in Sendai, in the centre of Japan’s Tohoku region, which bore the brunt of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster."It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you can actually invest in DRR, you don’t actually have to spend so much money after the crisis to feed the population." -- Izumi Nakamitsu

The UNDP also launched a new report at Sendai, titled ‘Strengthening Disaster Risk Governance: UNDP Support during the HFA Implementation Period 2005 – 2015’.

The report is a review of UNDP support in 125 disaster-prone countries since 2005, and draws on detailed findings from a selection of 17 countries. The findings from the report are to be used in the development of the new programme.

Following are excerpts of an IPS interview in which the UNDP Assistant Administrator Izumi Nakamitsu, who heads the agency’s Crisis Response Unit, explains what this Unit in particular and the agency in general are doing to reduce disaster risk (Interview transcript by Josh Butler at IPS U.N. Bureau in New York):

IPS: What was the idea behind setting up the Crisis Response Unit, and what does it do?

Izumi Nakamitsu (IN): UNDP is obviously a development cooperation organisation. But if you look at the world, there are so many crises. We have to make sure we become, or are, a development cooperation organisation that can also respond to crises properly and fast. If you can respond quickly to crises, you can from the start put perspectives of early recovery and also resilience. We can actually become much more strategic in the way the international community can actually respond to crises.

You hear this terminology of ‘fit for purpose.’ U.N. organisations need to change with the changing environment and context. That was the reasoning behind this rather dramatic restructuring of UNDP (in October 2014). As one of the outcomes, it’s not the only one, is a new entity called the crisis response unit.

We make sure UNDP actually takes a whole of UNDP approach. The crisis response perspectives and early recovery perspectives are integrated into everything that we do in development work. Our role is to make sure that, by becoming a sort of crisis coordinator, different parts of UNDP will be responding collectively so that we actually take the whole of UNDP approach.

I should also emphasise it’s not just a natural disaster context. In fact, if you look at the number of victims of humanitarian crises, 70-80 percent are in a conflict setting. It’s much more complicated to respond to that sort of crisis.

IPS: So disaster risk reduction is one complement of your activities?

IN: Risk reduction perspective has to be integrated into everything we do. The whole development actions will have to be risk-informed. All parts of UNDP are integrating perspectives.

It’s not just my little unit that coordinates and manages a crisis response, but there’s a large team that is specifically looking at how to mainstream DRR (disaster risk reduction) perspectives into everything UNDP does. It’s not just the crisis context. It has to be part of normal development work.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you can actually invest in DRR, you don’t actually have to spend so much money after the crisis to feed the population. We think it makes sense to integrate and mainstream these DRR perspectives throughout the development process.

IPS: How does the cooperation function in this case?

IN: Obviously we have to work together. A lot of the risk reduction part is to create a national sort of legal framework on the ground in different countries. We still have very good disaster management law, for example. We have been working quite a lot; in 70-80 percent of our programme countries, UNDP has been part of preparing that legislative framework to properly invest in DRR.

But that’s only the beginning of the work. We have to then create the actual capacities at the country level, so that thIs legislation will actually have an impact in terms of DRR.

IPS: And that’s more difficult?

IN: I wouldn’t say it’s difficult. It takes time. It’s about capacity building. For that to happen, we need to have good partners on the ground that are engaged with those stakeholders.

I was meeting with the secretary general of the federation of Red Cross societies, they have huge strength, because they have national chapters, national committees, who will be implementing those things in terms of capacity building. We have been partnering with them also in terms of preparing legislation as well.

The next step is to create capacities on the ground. We’re doing a lot of that. We think it makes sense to invest in those types of activities. We can’t prevent disasters. That is not possible. But if we can minimise the risk, we can manage the impact, then probably much smaller humanitarian interventions would be required. The whole international support will probably become much more sustainable.

IPS: Disaster prone countries lack funds, they also lack technologies. These will have to come from rich and industrialised countries. Isn’t that a problem?

IN: Of course . . . Japan just pledged 4 billion USD during the conference (as a gesture of goodwill). But it’s not just about the amount of money . . .There will have to be an understanding on the part of all governments that they have to invest in building DRR frameworks. They have to invest in building resilience and ensuring that resilience. It’s not just the amount of money but how you spend it.

IPS: It’s the old debate, the effectiveness.

IN: 2015 is a critical year: especially on the eve of (the finance for development meeting in) Addis Ababa, many countries are looking at what it is that they will have to agree. Sendai is the first one.

IPS: What would you suggest developing countries should expect from Addis?

IN: Let’s hope these intergovernmental processes will produce a strong enough policy framework that will actually fully recognise that these are in fact DRR, development concerns, and will be treated as such. Also that the countries will understand, you need to actually make investments in resilience and risk reduction.

But also, for UNDP, it’s very important that policy frameworks will not just be policy frameworks working in abstract. They have to be something that can be implemented in a concrete way on the ground in a country.

We have invested 2 billion USD in the last 10 years in this area, DRR. In terms of implementation capacity, we are the one who will have to actually take those policy frameworks, look at them, and reflect them into our country programmes. Our work will probably be much more intense when these frameworks are ready.

We will have to take them and operationalise them. Those are the hopes. These are all intergovernmental processes. We’re here to support the governments and inform, in our view, what works and what doesn’t work that well. And feeding those perspectives into government delegations in the form of advice.

IPS: We are entering the minefield, where it’s a question of: what does international cooperation achieve?

IN: I think national governments also have a huge responsibility, but that’s why we work with them. We are the largest partner of those governments, especially in DRR areas. I talked about disaster management laws in different countries.

That’s a prime example of governments taking their responsibilities and then creating the capacities to make sure these legislative frameworks will actually have an impact and work with them also. (National) Governments’ responsibilities and our support, they are probably both sides of the same coin.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Watch the full interview below:

A novice monk stares at the sea, after taking part in commemoration events to mark the 10th anniversary of the Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka’s southern town of Hikkaduwa. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KALMUNAI, Sri Lanka, Dec 31 2014 (IPS)

About six months after a massive tsunami slammed the island nation of Sri Lanka on Dec. 26, 2004, large plumes of smoke could be frequently seen snaking skywards from the beach near the village of Sainathimaruthu, just east of Kalmunai town, about 300 km from the capital, Colombo.

A petrified population had devised a makeshift early-warning system that would alert their fellow villagers of any incoming tsunami – burning rubber tires on the sand by the sea.

Residents of small coastal villagers would regularly look up from the task of removing rubble or repairing their demolished houses to check if the dark, smoky trails were still visible in the sky.

“You have to face a monstrous wave washing over your roof, taking everything in its path, to realise that you can’t drop your guard, ever." -- Iqbal Aziz, a tsunami survivor in eastern Sri Lanka
“If the smoke vanished, that meant the waves were advancing and we had to move out,” explained Iqbal Aziz, a local from the Kalmunai area in the eastern Batticaloa District.

Their fears were not unfounded. The villages of Maradamunai, Karativu and Sainathimaruthu, located 370 km east of Colombo, bore the brunt of the disaster, recording 3,000 deaths out of a total death toll of 35,322.

Humble homes, built at such close quarters that each structure caressed another, were pulverized when the waves crashed ashore the day after Christmas. What scared the villagers most was the shock of it all, with virtually no warnings issued ahead of the catastrophe by any government body.

In retrospect, there was plenty of time to relocate vulnerable communities to higher ground – it took over two hours for the killer waves to reach Kalmunai from their origin in northwest Indonesia. But the absence of official mechanisms resulted in a massive death toll.

Trauma and paranoia led to the makeshift early-warning system, but 10 years later the villagers have stopped looking to the sky for signs of another disaster. Instead, they check their cell phones for updates of extreme weather events.

The new system, fine-tuned throughout the post-tsunami decade, is certainly an improvement on its predecessor. Just last month, on Nov. 15, a huge 7.3-magnitude offshore earthquake was reported about 150 km northeast of Indonesia’s Malaku Islands. Villagers like Aziz only had to consult their mobile phones to know that they were in no danger, and could rest easy.

The pulverised beach in Kalmunai, located in eastern Sri Lanka, was stripped of most of its standing structures by the ferocity of the waves. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

“The tsunami was like a wake-up call,” Ivan de Silva, secretary of the ministry of irrigation and water management, told IPS.

Besides the tragic death toll, the reconstruction bill – a whopping three billion dollars – also served as a jolt to the government to lay far more solid disaster preparedness plans.

Dealing with the destruction of 100,000 homes and buildings, and coordinating the logistics of over half a million displaced citizens, provided further impetus for creating a blueprint for handling natural catastrophes.

In May 2005, Sri Lanka implemented its first Disaster Management Act, which paved the way for the establishment of the Disaster Management Council headed by the president.

Three months later, in August 2005, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) came into being, tasked with overseeing all disaster preparedness programmes, early warnings and post-disaster work.

Now, less than a decade later, it has offices in all of the country’s 25 districts, and carries out regular emergency evacuation drills to prep the population for possible calamities.

In April 2012, the DMC evacuated over a million people along the coast following a tsunami warning, the largest exercise ever undertaken in Sri Lanka’s history.

But the national plan is far from bullet proof. As Sarath Lal Kumara, assistant director of the DMC, told IPS: “Maintaining preparedness levels is an on-going process and needs constant attention.”

In fact, glaring lapses in disaster management continue to cost lives on an island increasingly battered by extreme weather events.

The latest such incident occurred during the same week as the 10^th anniversary commemoration of the tsunami, when heavy rains lashed the northern and eastern regions of the country.

By the time the rains eased, 35 were dead, three listed as missing, a million had been marooned and over 110,000 displaced. Most of the deaths were due to landsides in the district of Badulla, capital of the southern Uva Province.

Unfortunately, two months ago, another village in the same district suffered multiple fatalities due to landslides. On Oct. 29, in the hilly village of Meeriyabedda, located on the southern slopes of Sri Lanka’s central hills, a landslide prompted by heavy rains killed 12 and 25 have been listed as missing.

A man walks past the 10-foot wall near the boundary of the Southern Extension of the Colombo harbour, which was built as a protective measure against a future tsunami. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

There was no clear early warning disseminated to the villagers, despite the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO) issuing warnings several days before of possible landslides. Nor was any pre-planning undertaken using NBRO hazard maps that clearly indicated landslide risks in the villages.

The twin tragedies were not the first time – and probably won’t be the last – that lives were lost due to failure to effectively communicate early warnings.

In November 2011, 29 people died in the Southern Province when gale-force winds sneaked up the coast unannounced. In July 2013, over 70 were killed in the same region, largely because fisher communities in the area were not informed about the annual southwest monsoon moving at a much faster speed than anticipated.

“We need a much more robust early warning dissemination mechanism, and better public understanding about such warnings,” DMC’s Kumara said.

The recent landslide proved that simple trainings alone are not sufficient to prompt efficient responses to natural disasters.

Meeriyabedda, for instance, has been the site of numerous training and awareness programmes, including a major initiative carried out in conjunction with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society (SLRCS) in 2009 that involved mock drills and the distribution of rain gauges and loudspeakers to locals in the area.

Yet there was no evidence to suggest that villagers used the training or equipment prior to the landslide.

R M S Bandara, head of the NBRO’s Landslide Risk Research and Management Division, told IPS that while extensive maps of the island’s hazard-prone areas are freely available, they are not being put to good use.

“Not only the [general] public but even public officials are not aware of disaster preparedness. It still remains an issue that is outside public discussions, [except] when disasters strike,” he asserted.

Currently, only those who have faced disasters head-on understand and appreciate the need to think and act at lightening-quick speeds. “You have to face a monstrous wave washing over your roof, taking everything in its path, to realise that you can’t drop your guard, ever,” Aziz said.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Two fisherwomen walk along the seashore in Nemmeli. The village that saw widespread destruction in the 2004 tsunami and several cyclones since now has a unique community college where locals can learn disaster management. Half the students are women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
NEMMELI, India, Dec 20 2014 (IPS)

Ten years have now passed, but Raghu Raja, a 27-year-old fisherman from the coastal village of Nemmeli in southern India’s Kanchipuram district, still clearly remembers the day he escaped the tsunami.

It was a sleepy Sunday morning when Raja, then a student, saw a wall of seawater moving forward, in seeming slow motion. Terrified, he broke into a run towards the two-storey cyclone shelter that stood at the rear of his village, along an interstate highway.“This is what being a climate refugee is like.” -- Founder of the "Cyclone College", Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy

Once there, the teenager watched in utter bewilderment as the wall of water hammered his village flat.

“I didn’t know what was happening, why the sea was acting like that,” Raja recalls.

Later, he heard that the seabed had been shaken by an earthquake, triggering a tsunami. It was a new word for Nemmeli, a village of 4,360 people. The tsunami destroyed all the houses that stood by the shore, 141 in Raja’s neighbourhood alone.

A decade later, the cyclone shelter that once saved the lives of Raghu Raja and his fellow villagers is a college that teaches them, among other things,  about natural disasters like tsunamis and how best to survive them.

The state-funded college was established in 2011. One of its primary goals was to build disaster resilience among communities in the vulnerable coastal villages. Affiliated with the University of Madras, the college offers undergraduate degrees in commerce and sciences, including disaster management and disaster risk reduction.

Today a married father of two, Raja, whose education ended after 10^th grade, dreams that one day his children will attend this college.

Understanding the dangers that surround them

While Raghu Raja’s dream will take some time to come true, his fellow fisherman Varadaraj Madhavan is already there: two of his three children have attended the “cyclone college”.

His 22-year-old daughter Vijaya Lakshmi has already graduated from the college – the first graduate in Madhavan’s entire clan – and 18-year-old son Dilli Ganesh is expected to follow suit next year.

During her three years of college, Laxmi studied English, Computer Applications and Disaster Management. Among her greatest achievements as a student has been creating a “Hazard Map” of her village. The map, prepared after an extensive study of the village, its shoreline and soil structure, shows the level of vulnerability the village faces.

“This is a real time status,” says Ignatius Prabhakar of SEEDS India, an NGO that trains vulnerable communities in disaster preparedness. “There are different colours indicating different types of sea storms and the levels of threats they pose. The map, meant to be updated every three months, is for the villagers to understand these threats and be prepared.”

There are seven neighbourhoods in Nemmeli and a copy of the hazard map stands at the entrance of each of them. Laxmi, who worked alongside a team of engineering students from Chennai on the mapping project, describes is as a great learning experience.

“I learnt a lot of our village, the environment here. For example, I learnt how disappearance of sand dunes, overfishing and garbage disposal can increase the threats of flooding. I also learnt where everyone should go in time of a disaster and how exactly we should evacuate,” she says.

The young woman is now also a member of the Village Residents Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction – a community group that actively promotes disaster preparedness.

From cyclone shelter to learning hub

Though highly popular now, it was an uphill task to set up the college, recalls Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy, a professor at the University of Madras and the founder of the college.

To begin with, the state government had asked the college to be operational from the year 2011. It was summer already, but there were no buildings to hold the classes in and no land allocated yet to build one. After several rounds of intense lobbying of local government officials, Krishnamurthy was offered the cyclone shelter to run the college.

The next big step was to convince the villagers to send their children to the college.

“We hired an auto-rickshaw (tuk tuk) and fixed a loudspeaker on top on it. My assistant would drive the vehicle around the neighbourhood all day, calling on the villagers to send their children to the college. I would wait right here, under a tree, waiting for a parent to turn up,” says Krishnamurthy, says who was the principal until recently and is credited for the college’s current popularity and its successful disaster risk reduction programme.

In the first year of the college, 60 students enrolled. After four years, the number has gone up to 411 and half of them are women, says Krishnamurthy.

Sukanya Manikyam, 23, who recently graduated, was one of the first students to enroll. She is now planning to join a post-graduate course. “I would like to teach at a university one day,” she says.

According to Krishnamurthy, since the tsunami, the rate of erosion along the shore has been visibly increasing. The topography of the sea bed has changed, the sand dunes are disappearing and houses are caving in, slowly rendering the villagers homeless and causing internal displacement.

“This is what being a climate refugee is like,” says Krishnamurthy.

As the danger of displacement from the advancing sea grows greater, so does this fishing community’s need for alternative livelihoods. The ‘cyclone college’ is catering to this need, providing knowledge and information that can help residents find new jobs and build new lives.

Tilak Mani, a 60-year-old villager, is optimistic about the future. “Ten years ago, the tsunami had left all of us in tears. Today, our children have the skills to steer us towards safety in such a disaster.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

One year after Typhoon Haiyan, more than four million people still remain homeless. Credit: European Commission DG ECHO/Pio Arce/Genesis Photos-World Vision/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Diana Mendoza
MANILA, Nov 10 2014 (IPS)

People covered their bodies with mud to protest against government ineptitude and abandonment; others lighted paper lanterns and candles and released white doves and balloons to remember the dead, offer thanks and pray for more strength to move on; while many trooped to a vast grave site with white crosses to lay flowers for those who died, and to cry one more time.

These were the scenes this past Saturday, Nov. 8, in Tacloban City in central Philippines, known as ground zero of Typhoon Haiyan.

One year after the storm flattened the city with 250-kph winds and seven-metre high storm surges that caused unimaginable damage to the city centre and its outlying areas and killed more than 6,500 people, hundreds remain unaccounted for.

Nov. 8 marked the first anniversary of Haiyan, known among Filipinos as Yolanda, the strongest storm ever to make landfall in recorded history.

Thousands of stories, mostly about loss, hopelessness, loneliness, hunger, disease, and deeper poverty flooded media portals in the Philippines. There were also abundant stories of heroism and demonstrations of extraordinary strength.

Understanding the scope of the disaster

"We have felt a year's worth of the government's vicious abandonment, corruption, deceit, and repression, and have seen a year's worth of news and studies that confirm this situation." -- Efleda Bautista, one of the leaders of People Surge, a group of typhoon survivors
There may be some signs that suggest a semblance of revival in Tacloban City, located about 580 km southeast of Manila, but it has yet to fully come back to life – that process could take six to eight years, possibly more, according to members of the international donor community.

Still, the anniversary was marked by praise for the Philippines’ “fast first-step recovery” from a disaster of this magnitude, compared with the experience of other disaster-hit places such as Aceh in Indonesia after the 2004 Asian tsunami that devastated several countries along the Indian Ocean.

In its assessment of the relief and reconstruction effort, released prior to the anniversary, the Philippines-based multilateral Asian Development Bank (ADB) said that while “reconstruction efforts continue to be a struggle”, a lot has been done.

“The ADB has been in the Philippines for 50 years, and we can say that other countries would not have responded this strongly to such a huge crisis,” ADB Vice President for East Asia and Southeast Asia Stephen Groff told a press conference last week.

Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines Neil Reeder echoed his words, adding, “The ability of the country to bounce back was faster than we’ve ever seen in other humanitarian disasters.”

Experts say that Filipinos’ ‘bayanihan’ – a sense of neighbourhood and communal unity – helped strengthen the daunting rehabilitation process.

“Yolanda was the largest and most powerful typhoon ever to hit land and it impacted a huge area, including some of the poorest regions in the Philippines. It is important that we look at the scale and scope of this disaster one year after Yolanda,” Groff stressed.

He said the typhoon affected 16 million people, or 3.4 million families, and damaged more than one million homes, 33 million coconut trees, 600,000 hectares of agricultural land, 248 transmission towers and over 1,200 public structures such as provincial, municipal and village halls and public markets.

Also damaged were 305 km of farm-to-market roads, 20,000 classrooms and over 400 health facilities such as hospitals and rural health stations.

In total, the storm affected more than 14.5 million people in 171 cities and municipalities in 44 provinces across nine regions. To date, more than four million people still remain homeless.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino III has faced criticism from affected residents, who used Saturday’s memorial to blast the government for its ineptitude in the recovery process.

Efleda Bautista, one of the leaders of People Surge, a group of typhoon survivors, told journalists, “We have felt a year’s worth of the government’s vicious abandonment, corruption, deceit, and repression, and have seen a year’s worth of news and studies that confirm this situation.”

Protesters burned a nine-foot effigy of the president on the day of the anniversary.

Early morning on Nov. 8 more than 5,000 people holding balloons, lanterns, and candles walked around Tacloban City in an act of mourning and remembrance.

The Roman Catholic Church declared the anniversary date as a national day of prayer as church bells pealed and sirens wailed at the start of a mass at the grave-site where nearly 3,000 people are buried.

Hundreds of fishermen staged protests to demand that the government provide new homes, jobs, and livelihoods, accusing government officials of diverting aid and reconstruction funds.

Filipino netizens recalled that they cried nonstop while helplessly watching on their television and computer screens how Tacloban City was battered by the storm.

They posted and shared photos of Filipinos who were hailed as heroes because they volunteered to meet and drive survivors to their relatives in Manila and other places as they alighted from military rescue planes.

“Before” and “after” pictures of the area also made the rounds on the Web.

‘Billions’ in international assistance

President Aquino in a visit to nearby affected Samar island before the storm anniversary said, “I would hope we can move even faster and I will push everybody to move even faster, but the sad reality is the scope of work we need to do can really not be done overnight. I want to do it correctly so that benefits are permanent.”

The Philippine government estimates the need for a 170-billion-peso (3.8-billion-dollar) master-plan to rebuild the affected communities, including the construction of a four-metre-high dike along the 27-km coastline to prevent further damage in case of another disaster.

Alfred Romualdez, the mayor of Tacloban City, told journalists two million people are still living in tents and only 1,422 households have been relocated to permanent shelters. As many as 205,500 survivors are still in need of permanent houses.

The recovery process was successful in erecting new electricity posts a few months after the storm, while black swaths of mud have now been replaced by greenery, with crops quickly replanted, and rice fields thriving once more.

Government, private, and international aid workers also restored sanitation and hygiene programmes in the aftermath of the storm.

The ADB announced it was trying to determine whether or not to provide a further 150 million dollars worth of official assistance to Yolanda survivors on top of the 900 million dollars already pledged in grants and concessions at the start of reconstruction efforts.

The United States’ Agency for International Development (USAID) is expected to provide a 10-million-dollar technical assistance plan to develop 18,400 projects across the country. These will cover other hard-hit areas outside of Tacloban City, such as Guian in Eastern Samar, which will also receive 10 million dollars from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for rehabilitation programmes.

The Canadian government also offered 3.75 million Canadian dollars to restore livelihoods and access to water to the affected provinces of Leyte and Iloilo.

The Philippine government assured that the billions donated, offered and pledged by the international community would be safely accounted for, monitored, guarded and reported on with transparency.

Panfilo Lacson, a senator who was designated in charge of the rehabilitation programme, said that already he has confirmed reports that some bunkhouses in Tacloban and Eastern Samar were built with substandard materials and that someone had colluded with contractors for the use of substandard materials to generate kickbacks.

“That’s when I realised we have to monitor the funds,” he said.

He asked Filipinos to share information that they know about irregularities on the management and administration of the billions of pesos from the national coffers and donor organisations for rebuilding communities.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Aerial view of a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince. Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers following the 2010 earthquake, environmental problems were created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

Relief work done by emergency responders during natural disasters may inadvertently exacerbate problems caused by climate change and lead to further disasters, recent reports suggest.

When heavy rains caused nearly 20 million dollars in losses in Diego Martin, western Trinidad, in 2012, emergency responders moved rapidly to provide relief to affected residents, some of whom lost their homes.An estimated 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from Haiti's discarded tents if they were left in landfills.

However, just under two weeks later, Diego Martin was again inundated, this time due to a tropical storm.

A newly released report by the Trinidad and Tobago Red Cross Society (TTRCS) raises the possibility that the second flooding may have partly been due to the relief work done by the emergency responders.

The report states “after the first flooding incident water supplies were distributed in individual disposable, non-biodegradable vessels such as plastic bottles and food supplies were distributed with plastic utensils.

“In addition to the intense rainfall, one of the major contributing factors to the Diego Martin flooding was the clogging of waterways. Waste collection services immediately following the disaster were restricted… Use of [eco-friendly, biodegradable] materials could have helped negate the possibility of flooding.”

The TTRCS’ report, entitled “Green Response: A Country Study”, was presented by the head of Trinidad and Tobago’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) to a recent meeting of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

It was prepared following a feasibility study “on how to reduce, in a sustainable way, the environmental impact of the products and technologies used in response to and recovery from disasters.”

Trinidad and Tobago decided to undertake the study following an ACS meeting in 2011 where the issue of greening the region’s responses to natural disasters was raised for consideration.

Greening disaster relief efforts has become a major concern internationally, since as the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit notes, while “DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) seeks to reduce the risk of harm from disasters… the implementation of activities defined by disaster risk assessments, or by interventions presumed to reduce risk, itself has a risk of doing harm if the activities do not address environmental sustainability.”

Hence, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) report notes that organisations heavily involved in such work are “considering both current and future disaster and climate change risks and including various measures to address them, in recovery programming.”

The need for such considerations was particularly evident in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that took more than 200,000 lives.

Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers who were deployed to help in recovery efforts following the earthquake, there was also the environmental problem created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months.

The IFRC Practice Note Report on Haiti notes that 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from the discarded tents if these were left in landfills.

“The key issue,” said ACS’s director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction, George Nicholson, “is having to find a way to ensure that regardless of the things we do, whether work activities or specific activities for disaster response, to ensure that the things have the least impact on the environment.”

The Trinidad and Tobago government is committed to incorporating climate change and  environmental considerations into all its programmes. So when the question of a green response to disaster management came up for consideration at the ACS, the country offered to do the feasibility study for what has been dubbed the Green Response.

The ACS has worked with the ODPM, which has lead responsibility for the initiative in the country, the IFRC, and the TTRCS on the study.

Nicholson said that pursuant to the study’s findings, other ACS member countries “may look to see what was done by Trinidad and Tobago and then adapt or adopt their mechanisms.”

TTRCS’ Stephan Kishore said greening disaster relief efforts would involve activities such as locally manufacturing and pre-positioning relief supplies, so as to reduce the carbon footprint involved in shipping items from China, where most of the country’s relief supplies now come from.

It would also involve simple procedures such as using paper, cloth, or buckets rather than plastic to wrap relief supplies, and wrapping items, like soap, in bulk rather than in individual wrappings. Further, green relief efforts would encourage recycling of items and use of solar energy rather than fossil fuels.

However, a major consideration in greening disaster relief efforts is the legislative framework governing disaster relief organisations. Nicholson said the feasibility study looks at Trinidad and Tobago’s “legislative processes, its operational systems to see where you can get benefits out of being more green in your approach.”

But introducing legislation that would green disaster relief efforts will not be easy, Kishore said. “To get legislation passed for any response is very difficult. The whole process of getting legislation is very difficult,” he said.

Further complicating matters, Nicholson said, is that the ACS’ members states operate under several different legislative frameworks since the countries include Dutch, French, Spanish, and English-speaking countries with different legal traditions.

“All of them have totally different legislative environments, so you cannot write one thing and say we can establish best practices. Countries will look at that checklist of best practices [from the study] and see how best they can adopt their own environment to suit.”

With the feasibility study phase complete, the next stage of the Green Response is to identify or develop green disaster response processes and products from the region, which may include encouraging local manufacturers to begin producing recyclable items that can be used during a natural disaster.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at jwl_42@yahoo.com

When isolated by floodwaters, families have no choice but to use boats for transportation; even children must learn the survival skill of rowing. Here in India’s Morigaon district, one week of rains in August affected 27,000 hectares of land. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Priyanka Borpujari
MORIGAON, India, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

The northeastern Indian state of Assam is no stranger to devastating floods. Located just south of the eastern Himalayas, the lush, 30,000-square-km region comprises the Brahmaputra and Barak river valleys, and is accustomed to annual bouts of rain that swell the mighty rivers and spill over into villages and towns, inundating agricultural lands and washing homes, possessions and livestock away.

Now, the long-term impacts of such natural disasters are proving to be a thorn in the side of a government that is racing against time to meet its commitments under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of poverty reduction targets that will expire at the year’s end.

A woman dries blankets after her home went underwater for five days in one of the villages of the Morigaon district. The woven bamboo sheet beyond the clothesline used to be the walls of her family’s toilet. August rains inundated 141 villages in the district. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Target 7C of the MDGs stipulated that U.N. member states would aim to halve the proportion of people living without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

While tremendous gains have been made towards this ambitious goal, India continues to lag behind, with 60 percent of its 1.2 billion people living without access to basic sanitation.

Diving into the river is an easy solution to a lack of bathrooms for children and men, even though the water has been stagnant for about a month. Skin rashes are the most common ailment caused by contact with unclean water, according to village doctors. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Now, recurring floods and other disasters are putting further strain on the government, as scores of people are annually displaced, and left without safe access to water and sanitation. In 2012 alone, floods displaced 6.9 million people across India.

Currently, Assam is one of the worst hit regions.

Floods in Morigaon have submerged about 45 roads in the district. Most people wade through the water, believing this is quicker than waiting for a rickety boat to transport them across. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Since May this year, several waves of floods have affected more than 700,000 people across 23 of the state’s 27 districts, claiming the lives of 68 people.

In places where roads have collapsed, the government has erected bamboo bridges. When the government is absent, locals do this work themselves. This man and child travel from one village to another on a boat, and travel by foot over the bridges. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Heavy rainfall during one week of August devastated the Morigaon and Dhemaji districts, and the river island of Majuli. A sudden downpour that lasted two days in early September in parts of Assam and the neighbouring state of Meghalaya claimed 44 and 55 lives respectively.

Men transporting milk from Dhemaji to Dibrugarh district across the Brahmaputra River wash their utensils in the river. The lack of hygiene and proper sanitation facilities is a severe concern in flood-affected areas. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

The Indian federal government last week announced its intention to distribute some 112 million dollars in aid to the affected population.

In Dhemaji district, closer to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, people use a rope boat in the absence of a road. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

One of the primary concerns for officials has been the sanitation situation in the aftermath of the floods, with families forced to rig up makeshift sanitary facilities, and women and children in particular made vulnerable by a lack of water and proper toilets.

Women from the Mishing community in Dhemaji district are shocked by the siltation caused by the floods. Their homes on stilts – known as chaang ghor – are built on a raised platform. But the sands have submerged the homes in this village by two feet. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Directly following the floods, the ministry of drinking water and sanitation advised the public health and engineering department of the Assam government to “urgently” make provision for such disasters, particularly ensuring safe water for residents in remote rural areas.

Women from Rekhasapori village in Dhemaji district walk on the hot sand towards a health camp set up by Save The Children. Most people complain of rashes, and acidity from acute hunger. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Among other suggestions, the ministry recommended the “hiring of water tankers for emergency water supply to affected sites […], procuring of sodium hypochlorite, halogen tablets and bleaching powder for proper disinfection [and] hiring of sufficient vehicles fitted with water treatment plants to provide onsite safe drinking water.”

Mohini Pait delivered her daughter on the day after floods in the Rekhasapori village of Assam state washed her house away. She and her baby are currently living in one of many relief camps that dot the roads in flood-affected areas throughout Assam. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

In Morigaon and Dhemaji, families are slowly trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, but experts say unless proper disaster management measures are put in place, the poorest will suffer and floods will continue to erode India’s progress towards the MDGs.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Fisherfolk are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in India. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
NAGAPATTINAM, India, Aug 31 2014 (IPS)

As the United Nations gears up to launch its newest set of poverty-reduction targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015, the words ‘sustainable development’ have been on the lips of policymakers the world over.

In southern India, home to over a million fisherfolk, efforts to strengthen disaster resilience and simultaneously improve livelihoods for impoverished fishing communities are proving to be successful examples of sustainable development.

Here in the Kollam district of the south-western Kerala state,multimedia outreach programmes, using nationwide ocean forecasts, are bringing much-needed change into the lives of fisherfolk, who in southern India are extremely vulnerable to disasters.

“Despite having a 7,500-kilometre coastline and a marine fisherfolk population of 3.57 million spread across more than 3,000 marine fishing villages, India [has no] detailed marine weather bulletins for fishermen [...]." -- John Thekkayyam, weather broadcaster for Radio Monsoon
A fishing family earns on average some 21,000 rupees (about 346 dollars) per month but most of these earnings are eaten up by fuel expenses, repayment of boat loans and interest payments.

Savings are an impossible dream, and fisherfolk have neither alternate livelihood options nor any kind of resilience against disasters.

In Jul. 2008, 75 Tamil-speaking fisherfolk from the district of Kanyakumari in the southern state of Tamil Nadu perished during Cyclone Phyan, caught unawares out at sea. The costal radio broadcasts, warning of the coming storm, did not deter the fishers from heading out as usual, because they could not understand the local language of the marine forecasts.

Earlier this year, on Jul. 22, 600 fisherfolk sailing on about 40 trawlers went missing off the coast of Kolkata during a cyclone and were stranded on an island near the coast of Bangladesh. Only 16 fishers were rescued.

The incident revived awareness on the need for better communication technologies for the most vulnerable communities.

The Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) is leading the charge, by uploading satellite telemetry inputs to its server, which are then interpreted and disseminated as advisories by NGOs like the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and Radio Monsoon.

Best known for its state-of-the-art tsunami early warning forecasts, INCOIS offers its surplus bandwidth for allied ocean advisory services like marine weather forecasts, windspeeds, eddies, and ocean state forecasts (including potential fishing zones) aimed at fisherfolk welfare and mariners’ safety.

“Oceanographers in INCOIS interpret the data on ocean winds, temperature, salinity, ocean currents, sea levels [and] wave patterns, to advise how these factors affect vulnerable populations,” INCOIS Director Dr. Satheesh Shenoi told IPS.

“These could be marine weather forecasts, advisories on potential fishing grounds, or early warnings of tsunamis. INCOIS generates and provides such information to fishers, [the] maritime industry, coastal population [and] disaster management agencies regularly,” he added.

This new system works hand in hand with community-based information dissemination initiaitves that shares forecasts with the intended audience.

John Thekkayyam, weather broadcaster for Radio Monsoon, told IPS, “Despite having a 7,500-kilometre coastline and a marine fisherfolk population of 3.57 million spread across more than 3,000 marine fishing villages, India [has no] detailed marine weather bulletins for fishermen either on radio, TV or print media.”

Radio Monsoon and the MSSRF multimedia outreach initiatives are the first such interventions aimed at fisherfolk safety and welfare in India.

Radio Monsoon, an initiative of an Indian climate researcher at the University of Sussex, Maxmillan Martin, ‘narrowcasts’ the state of the ocean forecasts on loudspeakers in fisherfolk villages, asking for fishers’ feedback, uploading narrowcasts online and using SMS technology for dissemination.

“As our tagline says: it is all about fishers talking weather, wind and waves with forecasters and scientists. It contributes to better reach of forecasts, real-time feedback and in turn reliable forecasts,” Martin told IPS. Information is passed on to fishers via three-minutes bulletins in Malayalam, the local language.

Ultimately all this contributes to enhanced safety and security for fisherfolk.

According to S. Velvizhi, the officer in charge of the information education and communications division at the MSSRF, “The advisories from INCOIS are disseminated through text and voice messages through cell phones with an exclusive ‘app’ [a cellphone application] called ‘Fisher Friend Mobile Application’.

“We also broadcast on FM radio in a few locations, we have a dedicated 24-hour helpline support system for fishers and a GSM-based Public Address system,” she added.

“More than 25,000 fishers in 592 fishing villages in 29 coastal districts in five states (Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Odisha, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh), are receiving the forecast services daily,” Velvizhi claims.

On the tsunami battered coasts of Nagapattinam and Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, fisherfolk have become traumatised by anxiety, a depleting fish catch, changes in coastal geography and bathymetry, increase in loan interests, threats to their food and livelihood security and loss of fishing gear and craft.

In this context, MSSRF’s community radio initiative using affordable communication technologies for livelihood security has become a game changer.

The information dissemination services undertaken by MSSRF include – apart from ocean state forecasts –“counsel to fisher women, crop and craft-related content, micro finance, health tips, awareness against alcoholism [and] the need for formal education for fishers’ children all disseminated through text and voice messages” according to S. Velvezhi.

Summing up the cumulative effect of the initiatives, 55-year-old Pichakanna in MGR Thittu, who survived the tsunami in Tamil Nadu’s Pichavaram mangroves on Dec. 26, 2004, told IPS, “Thanks to MSSRF interventions on community radio we have learnt new livelihood skills like fishing whereas before the tsunami we were hunter-gatherers or daily-wage agricultural labourers.

“Our children are now getting formal education, we have awareness about better health and hygiene and alcoholism has decreased noticeably; this has helped [eliminate] unwarranted expenditure on alcohol and improved our health, livelihood and food security for all,” he added.

“We also understand the significance of micro-finance, water, sanitation, health and hygiene, and most importantly, alcoholism is declining.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

In the weeks since the South Korean ferry Sewol sank—taking with it the lives of over 300 passengers, the vast majority of them high school students — the country continues to be wracked by a palpable mix of grief, guilt, and outrage.

The aftermath of the sinking has exposed a uniquely Korean sense of collective guilt and personalisation of disaster. In a comment that typified the national mood over the past weeks, one man told the Los Angeles Times, “I feel embarrassed as a Korean. We failed our children.”

Across all sectors of the country, and in ways difficult for international audiences to comprehend, people feel personally responsible for creating a society in which such a tragedy would be allowed to occur.

This combination of culpability and helplessness has turned to anger, and not just at the unforgivable actions of the captain and crew, who abandoned ship while leaving hundreds of students trapped in their cabins. In what could prove to be a major problem for President Park Geun-hye, it is the South Korean government that is now bearing the brunt of the public’s wrath.

“A Government Mafia”

The Park administration has come under heavy criticism from relatives of victims, who have protested in front of the Blue House and charged that the government did not act quickly or decisively enough in the immediate aftermath of the sinking.

These criticisms have been repeated throughout the web and in Korean media outlets, with even the reliably conservative Joongang Daily claiming that the disaster “underscored that [the government] lacked ability in times of crisis.”

A lack of cooperation among the agencies in charge of emergency response, combined with shifting and often contradictory messages about the progress of the rescue, has painted a picture of institutional incompetence and damaged the public’s trust in its leaders. The resignation of Prime Minister Chung Hong-won over the government’s response to the accident has served to validate much of this criticism.

The catastrophe has also shined a light on the cosy relationship between industry and governmental regulators. The Sewol had been the subject of a number of safety concerns, including a finding earlier this year by the Korea Register of Shipping (KRS) that the ship had become top-heavy and less stable after additional passenger cabins were constructed on the upper decks.

Adding to this, the owner of the ferry, Chonghaejin Marine, had been accused by a former employee of overloading ships, covering up accidents, and mistreating its workforce. Despite these troubles, the Korean Shipping Association (KSA), a trade group responsible for certifying cargo safety, gave the ship a green light to carry out its ill-fated voyage.

Executive positions in both the KRS and KSA are filled by retired government officials, who are charged with lobbying their former colleagues on behalf of their new employers.

This system is prevalent throughout Korean industry, and has been cited by the president herself as a factor in fostering the lax safety standards that led to the disaster. In her public apology following the sinking, Park referred to this arrangement as a “government mafia” and called for an elimination of the practice.

Park’s Katrina?

In many ways, the Sewol tragedy mirrors one of the more famous examples of institutional breakdown: the U.S. government’s calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina.

In that case, failure to coordinate the relief effort between state and federal agencies compounded the initial impact of the hurricane, leaving New Orleans residents stranded without food, water, or shelter for several days after the storm hit.

As with the Sewol, accusations of political cronyism abounded in the aftermath of the incident, when it was revealed that three top officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including director Michael Brown, were Republican political operatives with no experience in disaster relief management.

Americans viewed the ghastly scenes of post-Katrina New Orleans on nightly television, and wondered how their government could have so completely and utterly failed at protecting its own citizens.

As in South Korea during the aftermath of the Sewol disaster, where the finger of blame is being squarely pointed at the entire system rather than one political party, Americans initially assigned blame to both state and federal authorities.

While Park’s public support has slipped as a result of the sinking, she still enjoys a relatively robust 57 percent approval rating. Although Park, like then President George W. Bush in the early weeks following Hurricane Katrina, has largely been able to evade personal responsibility, she would be wise to take heed of his subsequent experience.

Reflecting in 2008 on the impact of the disaster, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, noted that Hurricane Katrina “devastated President Bush.”

Through the mismanagement of the disaster, “his image as an incompetent president began to be reinforced and intensified.”

Bush’s approval ratings peaked at 45 percent in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina. But as the public perception of him began to change, he went from being seen as strong and decisive to looking bungling and inept, weighed down by Katrina as well as increasing public disillusionment with the Iraq War. His ratings plummeted, contributing to a landslide defeat of the Republican Party in the 2006 congressional elections.

Latent Outrage

Unlike Bush, Park may benefit from the shambolic state of the major opposition party, the New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD). Founded in March through a merger of the establishment Democratic Party (DP) and the minor New Politics Party led by former independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo, the new coalition has steadily lost ground to Park’s centre-right Saenuri Party.

By throwing in his lot with the DP, Ahn has sacrificed his most valuable political currency: his image as an outsider who can rise above traditional politics. His standing was further damaged after a dispute with his new partners led him to reverse a key campaign pledge regarding the nominating process for local candidates.

Ahn had been one of the few politicians in the country capable of providing a credible alternative to Park, and his marginalisation has paved the way for Saenuri to consolidate its hold on power in the Jun. 4 legislative elections.

Gallup polling taken during the week of the sinking showed voter support for Saenuri at 59 percent, compared to the opposition’s paltry 25 percent. The ensuing public anger at the government has so far failed to translate into gains for the NPAD.

While it is unlikely that the NPAD will provide much trouble for Park in next month’s elections, the reverberations of the Sewol tragedy will echo throughout Korean politics for years to come.

Koreans are not shy about taking to the streets to vent their anger, but the degree of shock and grief in the country right now is unprecedented in recent history, and has left people unsure of how to proceed.

Regardless of the outcome of the elections, the psychological impacts of the tragedy will continue to linger in the national consciousness. If left to fester, they will remain a latent force that could undermine the president’s ability to govern.

Mitigating the national trauma will require leadership that balances a sense of empathy with an assumption of personal responsibility, and swift actions to overhaul a system in drastic need of reform.

For Park, who is by turns viewed as uncommunicative, callous, and ineffective, the Sewol sinking may prove to be, like Bush’s Katrina, the moment when a presidency began to crumble.

Geoffrey Fattig is a graduate student at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He lives outside Seoul and writes about Korea at www.jeollamite.com. This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy In Focus.

A rare sight of a traditional hut of the Nicobarese in the post-tsunami era. Seen here is a Nicobari family that has retained its traditionally designed hut alongside a “permanent shelter” made of concrete that was given by the government as compensation for loss of household in the Asian Tsunami. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, Andaman Islands, India, May 12 2014 (IPS)

May and November bring the most vicious cyclones to the Bay of Bengal rim countries in Southeast Asia.

Local governments must scramble disaster mitigation measures, including food storage, cleaning cyclone shelters, stocking up water supply, sanitising infrastructure, and evacuating people to safety in all the regions bordering the bay.“Going by economists’ definition of supply and demand forces of the market, the Jarawas live in opulence." -- Prof. Anvita Abbi

The cyclones are the harbinger of the monsoons that play out in various densities for months on end across the subcontinent, often putting lives and livestock at peril.

Risking rejection of culture-insensitive food distribution to the evacuees, the governments generally resort to survival rations that stress shelf lives and transportation logistics, often ignoring the native wisdom in nutrition balance and distribution that complements local agro-meteorological and hydro-geological conditions.

For example, in times of cyclones or unseaworthy weather, “the Great Andamanese resort to hunting and gathering,” said Anvita Abbi, a professor at the Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University,who has deciphered the language of the Great Andamanese in the Andaman Nicobar Islands.

“When a particular bird sings a song, they know it is time to go turtle hunting on the beach instead of fishing in the sea,” Prof. Abbi told IPS.

The tribes defer to geomorphological conditions and respect Nature’s benevolence for disaster resilience. The governments’ panic might seem redundant to the tribes: no wonder they are at odds with the mainstream society and shun contact with a corrupted system that favours a few.  The tribes’ traditional wisdom helps them literally coast to safety.

“The Nicobarese and Jarawas switch to harpoon fishing in shallow waters during inclement weather. They have boats for deep sea fishing and dugout/outrigger canoes and catamarans for coastal fishing,” said A. Justin Superintending, an anthropologist at the Port Blair Regional Centre of Anthropological Survey of India.

The outrigger canoes and dugout boats are eco-friendly to coral reefs in shallows seas. “The people of Chowra are best known for making fishing boats. In return they barter other goods and services that money cannot buy in the tribal district of Nicobar Islands,” Justin told IPS.

“The Great Andamanese shift their fishing activities to streams and rivers inland when the sea is rough,” added Prof. Abbi.

In Orissa, the tribes and people of the state use five different varieties of rice to complement the seasonal changes in the disaster-prone state.

Alternate cropping with complementary crops that can act as natural pesticide is another tradition of the Soligas in B. R. T. Hills in Karnataka in India. The Soligas also know the art of refrigerating food in bamboo stems.

The tribes of Ladakh refrigerate yoghurt in yak hide bags to make butter tea. “To cope with extreme weather in Ladakh’s cold desert, they consume fatty foods and drink lots of butter tea,” Chewang Norphel, a social worker in Leh, told IPS.

“The tribal houses are made of sun-dried mud brick with mud plaster and low roof. Small sized door and windows facing the north side are other features of ecofriendly architecture.”

According to Dr. Avula Laxman, senior deputy director in the Division of Community Studies of National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau – National Institute of Nutrition, “Yes, tribals do adopt coping strategies, especially during natural calamities like droughts/floods.

“They adopt different measures such as consumption of low cost foods, reduce food consumption, borrow food or cash depending on their socio economic status, seek assistance from Government or Administration, use stocked grains, or food stocks or rely on savings, may migrate for employment or sell assets to buy food” according to a survey conducted by the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad, Laxman told IPS.

The practise of communal cooking and communal eating is based on sharing resources, and individualism is anathema to tribal society.

Another best practice that they have “transferred as a low cost technology” to modernised humanity is breast milk banks.

Traditional wisdom has it that if a mother dies at childbirth and the child survives, any other lactating mother in the community or even in a hospital assumes the responsibility of breast feeding.

Even when a natural mother lacks enough breast milk, other nursing mothers take over to provide the infant essential nutrition and resilience. In Jarawa society, in fact, every lactating mother breast feeds every newborn infant to foster a bonding in the newer generations, according to the book “Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the 20^th Century” by Kiran Dhingra.

“Their kinship terms have evolved. It is not surprising that lactating women who stay back in Strait Island get to babysit the kids of those away in employment in Port Blair. It is therefore not surprising that they breast feed another infant,” said Abbi.

This tradition permeates a cross-section of Indian society, transcending barriers of caste and creed. This is the root of the concept that there are no orphans in tribal societies even if they have “precise linguistic expressions for bereavement of siblings and in laws,” according to Prof. Abbi.

Laxman said that, “Tribals are trying to adopt urban and rural cultures, because of encroachment/migration of rural populations into tribal areas. The tribals’ unique culture is totally changed.

“Because of the Public Distribution System programmes, the tribals are compelled to eat rice continuously, because rice is chiefly/easily available at fair price shops. They are changing their healthy lifestyles to modern unhealthy lifestyles. This was observed especially in Kerala tribal population, leading to high stress, insecurity in their lives, leading to high hypertension and high diabetes even among tribal populations.”

Call them fair weather friends but the hill tribes like “Gaddi and Lahauli tribes of Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh India adapt to the geomorphological conditions in the avalanche-prone area to shift their livestock to greener pastures in the plains during summers and stock up food grains and dry rations for the long winters,” said forest officer Hira Lal Rana in Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh.

Prof. Abbi sums up the import of traditional wisdom for disaster resilience. “Going by economists’ definition of supply and demand forces of the market, the Jarawas live in opulence because their demand and supply of their needs is favourably tilted towards the Jarawas.

“The forests supply more than enough of what they need so they live in opulence.  Economists say reaching an equilibrium point of demand and supply curve is the hallmark of development. This is met by the forests. They don’t need and they don’t want our system which creates subservience.”

A cleric prays with Colleen James in Cane Grove, St. Vincent hours before it was confirmed that James' sister had died in the Christmas Eve floodwaters. Her two-year-old daughter was still missing. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jan 31 2014 (IPS)

The rise in natural disasters in the Caribbean due to climate change has led to increased suffering for both men and women, much of it as a consequence of socially constructed roles based on gender, experts say.

So although women typically suffer more during natural disasters, gender policies that specifically focus on helping men when disasters strike are also needed, according to a disaster management official in the Caribbean."[Women] connect to the whole concept of social capital - relying on each other, family connections and friends." -- Elizabeth Riley

“In the Caribbean region, discussions on gender are relegated to conversations on women,” Elizabeth Riley, the deputy executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), told IPS.

However, she said, experience of natural disasters in the region show that there is a need for psycho-social support programmes for males following a disaster.

A report prepared for the United Nations Development Programme entitled “Enhancing Gender Visibility in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change in the Caribbean” noted that men often lacked coping skills in the aftermath of a hurricane and were prone to alcohol abuse, stress, and anger.

Riley said reports from regional disasters showed women, on the other hand, responded to such events “by connecting to the whole concept of social capital – relying on each other, family connections and friends.”

She said women in these disasters occupied themselves with consoling children through story-telling, communal cooking and “encouraging people toward a place of recovery.” Other reports showed that men did show some resilience in tackling the reconstruction of their homes.

Reports of natural disasters in the region highlight other male vulnerabilities.

Riley said other reports show that “elderly men are abandoned and incapable of fending for themselves.”

“It is very closely connected to a culture where men have multiple partners and when they reach old age they do not have social capital for support,” she said.

“That is the result of the socially constructed role of men being macho” by having children with several women, she said. “It puts a level of burden on the state because the support for older men is significantly less than that for women,” she said.

In its 2004 macro-economic and social assessment of the damage wrought by Hurricane Ivan in Grenada, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States noted that “69 percent of the victims were males, and 70 percent of all deceased were over 60 years old.”

Men may be more likely to suffer physical harm in a natural disaster, said Dr. Asha Kambon, a consultant who worked for 20 years with UN-ECLAC, specialising in natural disasters and their impact on small island developing states. “We women are not as prone to risk-taking as men,” she noted.

Though women typically die in greater numbers than men in a natural disaster, Kambon told IPS the ratio of male to female deaths depended very much “on the environment, on the circumstances.”

For example, in the recent floods that occurred over the Christmas holidays in St. Vincent, Dominica, and St. Lucia, all six of the deaths in St. Lucia were of men, most of whom were attempting to drive through the floods.

She recalled that during floods in Guyana in a recent year, several men died from leptospirosis because of walking through flood waters, whereas no women died from this illness. Kambon said this was because the women took the recommended medication and avoided contact with the flood waters.

Nevertheless, natural disasters do place a special burden on women in the region in ways that mirror the experiences of women worldwide.

In the Caribbean, schools and churches are the most likely buildings to be used as shelters following a natural disaster. This increases the women’s burden of care, said Kambon, since “women are responsible for the children and the elderly, and very often the schools are not reopened rapidly following a disaster. So they have to look after those children, and they cannot go out and look for work.”

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer,” published by the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women, “Domestic work increases enormously when support systems such as childcare, schools, clinics, public transportation and family networks are disrupted or destroyed” due to natural disaster.

Many poor women in the Caribbean are employed at the lowest end of the tourism industry, and since disasters typically do severe damage to the industry, many are left unemployed because their skills are not easily transferable.

“Men are able to get into the marketplace faster because the skills they possess are transferable. Also, men often have some construction skills so they can get jobs in those sectors and earn an income,” Kambon said.

Women are less likely to be employed in the “cash for work” programmes that are frequently implemented following a disaster to rebuild a country’s infrastructure and to provide paid employment, said Riley, since men have the advantage of greater physical strength.

Kambon said that women are also less likely to be employed in such rebuilding programmes because of being restricted to the home in caring for elderly relatives and children.

Perhaps “a cash for care” programme could be implemented, she said, with a view to providing an income to women who would look after dependent members of the community, thus freeing other women to go out and look for work.

She said such considerations underscore the importance of knowing the gender ratio of the community when devising disaster response programmes.

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer”, “Emergency relief workers’ lack of awareness of gender-based inequalities can further perpetuate gender bias and put women at an increased disadvantage in access to relief measures and other opportunities and benefits.”

Further, in the aftermath of recent regional disasters, there was the issue “of the safety and well-being of women and children,” Kambon said, since there is often a breakdown of law and order.

Bathroom facilities also presented a problem for women in emergency shelters.

“What was adequate for men was completely inadequate for women, in terms of cleanliness, safety, location and the ability to use them,” Kambon said.

The Indian Armed Forces had run a massive rescue operation in the flood-hit state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Courtesy Ministry of Defence, Government of India

By Malini Shankar
DEHRADUN, India, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

Over 580 bodies have so far been found. Hundreds more will likely never turn up. Survivors say they are suspended in a kind of nightmare, either haunted by memories of their brush with death or desperate for news of loved ones. At least 3,000 are reported to be missing.

A fortnight after massive floods trapped thousands of tourists and pilgrims in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, frantic search and rescue operations are still under way.

Known as the Land of the Gods, this Himalayan state was tranformed from an idyllic prayer site into hell on earth when, on Jun. 15-17, torrential rains and flash floods caused by a cloudburst swelled the two headstreams of the holy river Ganga, which carried off thousands of people along with roads, homes, shops and large chunks of the mountains.

At the time of writing, only the pilgrimage town of Badrinath has been completely evacuated.

“The death toll is expected to increase after search and rescue operations cease and recovery commences,” he said, adding that the list of missing will be confirmed by Jul. 15.

Headlines and searchlights have largely focused on immediate events, bypassing the long-term, structural implications this tragedy will have on disaster management in India.

Already, the rescue operation is straining from a lack of coordinated action: families fear that their missing loved ones, living on nothing more than prayers, will not last much longer, while experts warn that swift and sanitary disposal of the dead is vital to prevent the spread of diseases; some scientists even fear that an outbreak of plague in the Himalayas is not far off.

When a rescue helicopter crashed in a valley thick with wildlife on Jun. 24, killing all 20 personnel on board, it provoked legitimate fears that the NDMA was floundering.

Confidence plummeted still further when a 3.5-magnitude earthquake struck Uttarakhand on Jun. 27, sparking panic that it would trigger landslides.

Requiring precision, highly trained personnel and a tight organisational command structure, search and rescue efforts have largely been entrusted to the armed forces.

Over the course of ten days the Indian Air Force flew approximately 2,000 sorties, averaging about one every five minutes, with help from the Indian Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the state police and civil administration.

An additional 600 sorties have so far carried 24 tonnes of food into the affected areas for survivors and the displaced.

Troops have helped erect temporary steel bridges at crucial access points, as many bridges and long stretches of road were washed away in the rapid waters.

Paramilitary forces like the ITBP and the NDRF are rescuing frail and infirm people trapped in tough terrain while drones scan caves and scour remote terrain to evacuate those stranded on riverbeds or clinging precariously to fragile, wet embankments.

Grateful to be alive, Shobha Karandalaje a politician from the South Indian state of Karnataka, told IPS, “It was a scary experience. We were on our way to Kedarnath (a popular pilgrimage town in Uttarakhand) when suddenly the downpour worsened; rivers were in full spate, land sliding all around us,” she recounted.

“We were stuck in our jeep for a full five days in Rudraprayag (a bustling town on the forest’s edge at the point of confluence of the Alakananda and Mandakini rivers), surviving on snacks, sipping water. We trekked back 35 kilometres to Yamunotri, where road construction workers helped us reach Dehradun (Uttarakhand’s capital) safely.”

Deforestation on the steep Himalayan slopes has increased the likelihood of landslides in Uttarakhand. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Successful rescues notwithstanding, disappointment hangs thick in the air, with scientists lamenting that the tragedy could easily have been minimised if developers had heeded warnings about the fragility of the surrounding ecosystem and if the state government had paid greater attention to weather forecasts.

India’s NDMA, set up in 2005 after the calamitous Asian Tsunami of 2004, is tasked with taking measures to reduce the risk to human lives and livelihoods before calamities strike, embodying the “paradigm shift from the erstwhile relief-centric and post-event syndrome to pro-active prevention…” according to the official guidelines.

Determined to avoid a tragedy on the scale of the Boxing Day tsunami, the government invested huge amounts in forecasting services that could deliver accurate reports to the NDMA, which is expected to take all necessary measures to minimise loss of human life.

Accordingly, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) issued a forecast of heavy rains in Uttarakhand starting Jun. 15, which failed to elicit a timely response from the state.

Addressing a press conference on Jun. 17, State Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna justified his government’s inaction by claiming that the “generic forecast (delivered ahead of the floods) was not actionable…(and) evacuating residents and pilgrims in the peak pilgrim season was impractical.”

He skirted allegations that unsustainable tourism development on the steep hill slopes coupled with forest denudation for the construction of numeours dams across rivers in landslide prone areas were largely to blame for the catastrophe.

Nor did he respond to activists’ long-standing grievances over mismanagement in disaster preparedness at the state government level.

Despite the Government of India approving a budget for a Doppler Weather Radar system capable of predicting a cloudburst, the state government has not granted the necessary land to house the forecasting equipment, effectively prioritising tourism development over disaster management.

Money for the acquisition of 200 satellite phones for the NDRF is also mired in bureaucratic delays, officials admit.

Being plugged in to a vast network of state and district-level offices, the NDMA should have monitored dam discharge, identified arterial routes for evacuation, stocked up on emergency supplies, created communication hubs and kept ambulances on standby in preparation for responding rapidly to forecasts.

Instead, the agency was caught off guard with barely minutes to prepare for the crisis.

The Central Water Commission, authorised to issue flood forecasts in India, failed to raise the alarm even on the night of Jun. 17 when the Mandakini River was already in full spate.

The CWC’s director of the flood forecast monitoring directorate, V.D. Roy, told IPS this was due to the fact that the raging water was technically “below the statutory warning level of 539 metres at (11 p.m.) on Jun. 17.”

But scientists and advocates refute this claim, insisting that the Commission ought to have foreseen the calamity heading for the most vulnerable regions of Uttarakhand like Uttarkashi, Hemkhund Sahib and Kedarnath.

Others accuse the government of failing to utilise India’s massive media apparatus to minimise the tragedy.

“Weather reports are disseminated to all public broadcasters, such as All India Radio and Doordarshan. If there is a specific warning, all broadcasters…should interrupt normal programming to disseminate this warning. This protocol must be developed and put in place,” NDMA Vice Chairman Shashidhar Reddy told IPS.

*Malini Shankar is a photojournalist, radio broadcaster and documentary filmmaker based in Bangalore, India.

Twice in 20 months, dozens of fishermen have perished in shallow waters off the Sri Lankan coast due to the absence of an early warning system. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

It was several hours before dawn when Afthas Niflal, a young fisherman in southern Sri Lanka, felt the sea start to rumble beneath him.

He was no stranger to the shallow waters off the fishing harbour in Beruwala, a small coastal town in the Kalutara District, about 50 km south of the island’s capital, Colombo, but nothing could have prepared him for what he experienced on the morning of Jun. 8.

“It was like the sea rose up, taking my boat with it,” the young man told IPS three days after his harrowing encounter. “Then the wind picked up and began tossing us around like sticks.”

Within minutes, a gigantic wave had topped the small boat, pitching Niflal and his companion into the stormy waters. He estimates that it was about 2.30 a.m. when they ended up hanging for dear life on to the sides of the capsized fishing craft.

“It was pitch dark, we could not see anything and the sea was howling like a deranged monster,” he said. When an Air Force helicopter finally picked them up nearly six hours later, the two exhausted men had all but given up hope.

Once safely back on land, they learned that gale force winds, which have become increasingly common in this South Asian island nation, had left 51 fishermen dead, while 16 were still missing out at sea.

Although it took many people by surprise, the tragedy this past weekend was not the first time in recent months that unsuspecting fisher folk have lost their lives to sudden and savage turns in the weather. This time, though, the loss of life has shed a critical light on the government’s early warning system – or lack thereof.

Vague communiqués

On Nov. 25, 2011, 29 fishermen in almost the same areas perished when furious winds tore through the southern coast, rousing the shallow waters into a deadly tempest. Eleven of those who lost their lives hailed from the village of Kaparatota, about 60 km south of Beruwela.

But the incident failed to spur the government into action. According to Niflal, none of the fishermen out on the sea on the morning of Jun. 8 received any communication or warning that the weather would turn rough.

Most traditional fishermen in Sri Lanka rely on weather bulletins carried on national TV or radio stations. Often, their best chance for communication is via mobile phones that have patchy coverage up to several kilometres out at sea.

But fishermen say updates from the Sri Lanka Meteorological Department are “annoyingly cryptic” at the best of times.

Three days after the most recent storm, for instance, the department noted: “A few showers will occur in the Western, Sabaragamuwa, Central and Southern provinces”, but failed to specify the consequences of fishermen heading out to sea.

The Department’s website released its storm warning at three in the morning on Jun. 8, by which time, according to survivors, the winds had already swept inland, leaving hapless fishermen struggling in the water.

At a time when extreme and erratic weather has become the norm in Sri Lanka, these ambiguous updates are nothing short of fatal.

“We are looking into means of improving our capacity and our forecasting resources,” S H Kariyawasam, director-general of the Meteorological Department, told IPS, adding that for the past 15 months the Department has been constructing a new and improved radar, known as the Doppler Radar, capable of detecting fast moving weather systems and providing detailed forecasts on the quantity of rainfall.

Other experts say that even if they had received red alerts, fishermen, like most of their countrymen and women, would not have had the knowledge or capacity to seek safer conditions.

Sri Lanka’s early warning system, built from scratch after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that claimed 30,000 unsuspecting lives, is focused on tsunami alerts, while the mass media lacks experience in effectively communicating weather-related information.

There is also an urgent need for public awareness campaigns across Sri Lanka’s coastal belt, to educate fishers on how to respond to alerts when they come.

Meanwhile, the agency tasked with public dissemination of warnings under the 2005 Disaster Management Act, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), says it never received a formal alarm from the Meteorological Department, and was therefore unable to spread the word ahead.

Ironically, just a fortnight prior to the latest tragedy, confident DMC officials told IPS that the country’s disaster preparedness levels were adequate to meet the challenges of increasingly fitful monsoon rains, which have wreaked havoc across Sri Lanka in the last year.

In November and December of 2012, torrential downpours left nearly 530,000 people stranded, 43 people dead and nearly 20,000 homes either damaged or completely destroyed.

Forecasts for the coming months indicate no change in these patterns, suggesting the urgent need for a hard reckoning with the country’s existing mechanisms, which were found seriously wanting last weekend when coastal communities were woken not by a national disaster alert but by the roar of 100-kmph winds barreling in from the sea.

In fact, some authorities in towns like Beruwala would not even have known that hundreds of fishermen were caught in the gale had it not been for a school teacher living close to the harbour, who phoned the nearest police station when it became clear that the storm was not a passing gust of wind.

In other coastal towns like Dehiwala and Rathmalana, about 10 km south of Colombo, residents furious at the delay in launching rescue operations barricaded the main coastal rail line with their boats, refusing to budge until Navy boats and Air Force choppers were mobilised in an official search for the missing.

It was one of these choppers that subsequently found and rescued Niflal and at least ten other survivors last weekend.

Confronted by a wave of outrage on the streets and in the media, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed a committee comprised of retired weather specialists to look into the tragedy and report to him “the reasons as to why affected people were not informed of the impending severe weather conditions in order to be able to take precautionary measures.”

Although such retrospective measures come too late for those who lost their lives, they may end up preventing unnecessary deaths in the future.

A Japanese flag standing amidst the rubble of the March 2011 tsunami. Credit: Daniel Pierce/CC-BY-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MINAMISANRIKU, Japan, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

As a survivor of Japan’s deadliest tsunami in living memory, Shun Ito dedicates his mornings to evoking stories of heroism that helped to save lives in this port town that was decimated on that fateful March afternoon two years ago.

Two names – Miki Endo and Takeshi Miura – frame the narrative that 37-year-old Ito shares with visitors as he guides them through this once quiet fishing resort, which still bears the scars of devastation left by the powerful waves on Mar. 11, 2011.

Among the few, gutted buildings still standing across empty stretches are the skeletal remains of the three-storey disaster-preparedness centre, where Endo and Miura served as radio operators.

They worked on the second floor and sent out messages through the town’s loudspeakers for people to get to higher ground as the tsunami approached, recalls Ito, who works as a receptionist at a hotel on the edge of this town.

“They remained at their job, giving warnings, even when it was known that the waves were higher than the building they were in.”

“They gave their lives to save others in this town,” adds Ito, standing in front of an impromptu memorial, complete with fresh flowers, which has come up near a blown-out wall of the centre. “We have to remember their sacrifice.”

Minamisanriku lost 1,206 of its 17,000 residents in March 2011, when 16-metre-high waves crashed over the town’s existing tsunami barriers barely 30 minutes after the powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake ruptured the seabed some 130 kilometres from Japan’s Pacific coastline.

The death toll could have been higher, thousands more, had it not been for the work ethic of Endo, Miura and other members of Japan’s well-drilled disaster response management programme, spread across the 12 prefectures along the coast, who sounded the alarm to save lives.

And as Japan remembered the 15,880 people who were killed and the 2,694 people still missing after the twin terrors of the earthquake and tsunami, the role of the first responders, so pivotal in disaster preparedness efforts, was celebrated.

The ones who died or went missing during their call of duty, like Endo and Miura, include 254 firefighters and volunteer fire corps, 30 police officers and three members of the country’s self defence force, according to official records.

“People tend to forget, that is why such storytelling is important,” affirms Fumihiko Imamura, a senior academic at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University. “These soft measures help to plan rebuilding and to protect people from the next tsunami.”

Such stories are being added to the graphic video footage of the raging waves crashing through towns as they surged many kilometres inland.

“The video material and other records in the media offer a more comprehensive picture to remember what happened,” Imamura said in an exclusive interview with IPS. “So when communities in the Tohoku region design buildings and plan escape routes, (information about) the height of the waves and how far inland they came will shape their decisions.”

In fact, the practice of stitching together a tapestry of memories and storytelling by members of the devastated communities taps into a Japanese tradition of “handing down memories” that goes back centuries.

The coastal region of this earthquake-prone and tsunami-hit country bears out these narratives in the form of carved warnings on stone tablets.

The memorial stones and rocks, some nearly three metres tall, have clear messages, such as: “If an earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis”, or another, which says, “Do not build your homes below this point”.

The more legible tablets that dot the coast were erected in the wake of the 1896 tsunami that killed 22,000 people, the worst in over a century until the 2011 disaster struck. A tsunami in 1707 killed 30,000 people.

Hundreds of these warnings from the past, some 600 years old, are viewed in this corner of Japan as a glimpse into a world that placed a premium on knowledge sharing in order to survive regular battering from the sea.

But some residents honour the warnings of old as proof that previous victims of deadly tsunamis did not die in vain and that their wisdom ensures successive generations live in safer areas.

This culture of keeping collective memory alive has taken other forms further inland, such as in the southern city of Kobe, which was hit by a devastating earthquake in January 1995 that killed 6,434 people.

There, an earthquake museum has emerged as the centerpiece of efforts to keep alive the memory of the temblor that struck at dawn.

The 500,000 visitors who walk through its halls every year are not only offered visual presentations of what happened, but they also get to hear real accounts from 40 survivors who are part of the museum’s 160 volunteer staff.

“This is a very effective way for the visitors to feel what happened,” admits Masahiko Murata, director of the Kobe-based Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute. “It is direct, human to human.”

Lessons from past disasters have also begun filling the pages of textbooks being distributed throughout Japan’s school system, adding a new layer to the country’s laudable efforts to reduce the impact of disasters.

“Disaster management manuals for schools are important to prepare future generations,” Murata told IPS. “We need to always keep transferring lessons to the next generations who have not experienced disasters and need to know what to do when caught in one.”

For Ito, one of those lessons is obvious. Minamisanriku’s new disaster preparedness centre should be a taller building and in a safer location to protect future radio operators. “We should do that for the sake of the two radio operators who died in 2011,” he says. “Mr. Miura was my friend. We coached the sports teams at the local school together.”

(END)

Kathmandu’s dense population of 1.5 million people is highly vulnerable to earthquakes. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Nov 23 2012 (IPS)

Nepal now ranks 11^th on a list of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, yet it remains one of the least disaster-prepared nations globally.

Two major earthquakes in the last two years, one on Sep. 18, 2011 and the other on Oct. 5 of this year, have failed to spur the government into action.

Seismologists have warned that another big earthquake is imminent and disaster experts claim that the population of 30 million will grow more vulnerable on a daily basis unless authorities “wake up” to the dangers posed by such catastrophes.

“In our current situation, the consequences of (a) disaster will be out of control and unmanageable. We have to move fast,” Ganesh Kumar Jimee, disaster preparedness manager of the National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal (NSET), told IPS.

Experts are particularly concerned about the 1.5 million residents of Kathmandu city, an earthquake epicenter in which most school buildings, hospitals and government offices are not earthquake resistant.

Over 90 percent of residential buildings, designed by ordinary masons with no input from professional engineers, are considered unsafe.

School buildings suffer from the same problem with an estimated 60 percent of the city’s public schools “bound to collapse”, according to the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC).

The World Health Organisation says that hospitals, too, are highly vulnerable.

According to NSET, over 60 percent of hospitals are at risk of damage in the event of an earthquake measuring anything more than 7.0 on the Richter scale. Most of the country’s 70 blood banks are not earthquake-proof.

In addition, dozens of bridges will also be impacted, thus cutting off crucial supply routes in case of an emergency.

Organisations like NSET and the Nepal Red Cross Society (NCRS) claim that 90 percent of the city’s water pipes will be damaged and 40 percent of electricity lines and electric substations will be destroyed.

Furthermore, Nepal’s many radio stations, which play a vital role in communicating disaster-related bulletins, are unlikely to withstand the impact of an earthquake.

According to IRIN news, these 350 radio stations, 36 of which are located in Kathmandu, are crucial sources of information for the country’s population, 44 percent of which is illiterate and relies on non-print media.

Disregarding all the available data on the urgency of the situation, the government has yet to take serious action on earthquake preparedness.

A lackadaisical attitude towards legislation on preparedness is a major obstacle. A Disaster Management Act has been pending for many years due to political instability in the country.

The Act would help establish a comprehensive Disaster Management Authority that will comprise a professional team of disaster experts, rescue teams, financial resources and equipment.

As of now, the only legitimate body tasked with overseeing disasters like earthquakes consists of a handful of people working in a small disaster unit under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

“Hopefully (these steps) will be taken soon and people will take this issue much more seriously from a risk reduction perspective rather than (focusing on) post-disaster activity,” Man Thapa, programme manager of the disaster risk management team for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS.

The UNDP is working with local municipalities and organising trainings for masons on how to construct earthquake-resistant buildings, which could “help save people’s lives”, said Thapa.

Kathmandu at risk

Kathmandu’s dense population of 1.5 million people packed into a metropolitan area of just over 50 square kilometres presents unique challenges.

The number of housing complexes has more than doubled over the last decade, further crowding the already congested city, according to experts.

Earthquakes are nothing new in Nepal, which has witnessed 16 major earthquakes since 1223. One of the most devastating quakes occurred in 1934, killing over 8,500 people in Kathmandu; another, in 1988, caused 721 deaths.

Given the current population explosion and a boom in unsafe, high-rise buildings, the scale of a similar disaster now is unimaginable.

NSET estimates that an earthquake measuring seven or eight on the Richter scale could destroy over 60 percent of the buildings, kill up to 50,000 people, injure 100,000 and render 900,000 homeless.

While awareness about the possibility of a disaster is high, very little is being done to retrofit houses, schools or even hospitals.

“People are still not paying serious attention to the information available,” Pitamber Aryal, disaster management director of the NRCS, told IPS.

When a 6.9 Richter scale earthquake occurred in northeast India on Sep. 18 last year, its impact was also felt in Kathmandu, causing widespread panic.

People began to flee the city in a chaotic manner, paying no attention to the safety tips that had been disseminated online and aired frequently through the city’s many local radios.

Fortunately, the brief earthquake took place at six in the evening, when all the offices and schools had already closed for the day.

“If it occurred during school or office hours, a lot of people would have been injured and killed as a result of the panic,” Jimee told IPS.

“That was a drill exercise for all the Kathmandu residents on how to act during a (disaster)…let’s hope they have learnt something,” he added.

(END)

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Sep 2 2012 (IPS)

Yumiko Yonekura, who survived last year’s massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Tohoku in northeast Japan, has just launched ‘Hot Care Kesenuma’, a welfare company that provides special care for feeble elders in the affected region.

“The idea of starting my own company that deals with care giving emerged when I was in the evacuation centre after the disaster. People were helping each other to survive and this encouraged me to contribute to the devastated community,” she told IPS.

Yonekura, 52, lives in Kesenuma that recorded 1,300 dead or missing following the Mar. 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami when waves as high as 30 metres crashed into the picturesque towns and villages that dot the coast of Miyagi prefecture, about  200 km northeast of Tokyo.

Miyagi along with Iwate, Fukushima, Akita, Aomori and Yamagata form the Tohoku region that was worst affected by the tsunami and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that followed.

Even before the disaster Tohoku had a depressed economy that caused the steady migration of its young and better educated population to the cities, leaving behind men and women well past their prime to struggle with family-run farming and fishing.

It took exceptional courage for Yonekura to start her company and win respect as a woman who could make a mark in disaster recovery in Tohoku, a backward and  tradition-bound region where the average age is 65 years.

Yuko Kusano, of the Sendai-based Jo-Net that supports female survivors, says Yonekura has proved that disasters can catalyse change in women – even if they have lived a major part of their lives in the patriarchal culture of Tohoku.

“The loss of family members, jobs and homes forced women in Tohoku to rethink traditional roles that expected them to be supportive wives and mothers,” said Kusano who assisted Yonekura at the beginning.

Achieving income sustainability and security are a major concern among gender experts who support the idea of female disaster survivors searching for financial independence.

Experts point out that most jobs available for women who no longer work in family farms or fishing are part-time, such as in reconstruction projects or as office workers in local companies that are cutting costs.

Women’s groups report that younger females, faced with a lack of jobs in their damaged towns, are forced to leave for the big cities where they end up in the sex industry.

“Long-term stability in a post-disaster society can be achieved only by planning carefully. Education, skill building and, most importantly, providing space for women to learn through discussions that they can do it, is the way to achieve gender-led recovery,” says Hiromi Narita, a gender expert.

Narita who leads seminars in computers and business skills at a single mothers forum, a section of the Miyagi local government said, “We have seen an increasing number of single women from the disaster areas joining our classes with the intention of finding new jobs or securing the ones they already hold down.”

While jobs for women have taken priority in disaster recovery, there is a need to provide emotional support since a large number of survivors are suffering from depression and anxiety.

Medical records filed from the Tohoku area indicate an increase in heart disease, hypertension and depression linked to inability to adjust to drastically altered lives in cramped and lonely evacuation centres.

The health and welfare ministry reported in April that the longevity of Japanese women, once ranked a high 85.90 years, has dropped by 0.04 years following the disaster. Females comprise half of the 345,000 people listed as displaced.

Rei Yamaya, who is a counsellor at the Morioka Women’s Centre, explains that her work with many of the women has revealed that trauma lingers but is ignored by authorities as a key concern in gender-based disaster recovery.

“In Tohoku’s conservative society, women rarely speak of depression or reach out for help for fear of appearing as bad wives or incompetent mothers. Reaching out to these survivors must, therefore, be sensitive to local cultural constraints,” she said.

Yamaya’s group has started cafés for women as a space where they can talk without fear of discrimination. “By eating tasty food along with their children, they break through their silent suffering,” she said.

The centre is supported by international funding, seen as an illustration of the lack of official support for trauma support programmes, other than tax concessions and other incentives to attract investment in Tohoku.

Yonekura agrees. Apart from providing health services to the elderly, she also plans to extend her work to provide emotional support, given the urgent needs in her community.

“I had to work hard to even convince my husband to allow me to start my own company. I can sympathise with female disaster survivors,” she said.

Says Kusano: “Basically, the women are starting from scratch, knowing that there is no returning to their former lives. We have to work together to learn to accept that a disaster can result in change for the better – learning new skills is the easy part.”

Indian Railway officials inspecting the burnt carriage in which 32 passengers perished on Monday. Credit: Indian Railways

By Malini Shankar
CHENNAI, Aug 4 2012 (IPS)

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Jul. 30, sleeping passengers in carriage S 11 on the Chennai-bound Tamilnadu Express were awoken by a blazing fire, as the train approached the east coast town of Nellore, just two and a half hours shy of its final destination.

At least 32 people burned to death in the train, their bodies charred so badly that hospitals were forced to use DNA analysis to identify the victims for anxious families.

Officials have not ruled out a short circuit in the train toilet or sabotage, considering one survivor reported hearing a loud bang in the burning train car.

Whether or not gas cylinders or other inflammable materials were aboard the train is yet to be established by the Railway’s formal inquiry.

For grieving family members, the inquiry might be too little too late.

But if similar tragedies are to be avoided in the future, authorities must use this accident to draw lessons in disaster management for the colossal Indian railway network, which operates 9000 trains carrying 18 million passengers daily. This number does not include the countless thousands who travel on train roofs, undeterred by the risk of fatal injuries inside mountain tunnels or the possibility of electrocution.

It quickly became apparent to disaster management experts, after the fire had been put out and the survivors pulled to safety, that the lack of emergency preparedness on most Indian trains is a huge liability.

It was the gatekeeper of a railway crossing who first noticed the fire in the passing carriage and notified the Nellore railway station, which halted the train. By then screaming passengers had already pulled at the emergency brake.

The burning car was immediately separated from the train to prevent the fire spreading to other coaches. But this did not make up for the fact that there were no fire alarms in the train cars.

The public relations officer of the South Central Railway, Frederick Michael, confirmed to IPS that there were no fire hydrants in the sleeper car.

“Since it was night time, the passengers had closed all the windows and one door of the vestibule that connects to the rear car was also locked for the night to prevent criminal elements’ entry and mischief,” he said. The other vestibule door, according to reliable sources, was also closed for the night, resulting in a death trap for the passengers.

Inflammable material like synthetic cushion covers and curtains, inadequate emergency exits and fire extinguishers, to say nothing of a poorly trained cabin crew are the main culprits in this avoidable disaster, experts told IPS.

Lower class train cars, which carry millions of Indians, do not contain a single fire extinguisher or hydrant. Nor are passengers instructed in basic emergency evacuation procedures. Further, there is no public address system on board the long-distance non-luxury trains.

Railway coaches are in dire need of inflatable life rafts with a rigid hull, disaster management experts aver. These rafts should automatically unfurl themselves as escape chutes from the hinges of the emergency exits in case of a fire, or during a water evacuation.

These can help save lives and can also double up as easy transport for frail, infirm and physically challenged passengers.

Wide emergency exits with collapsible shutters that can automatically open during emergencies need to be installed by the dozen in every train car. Currently each car has only four emergency exits and four entry doors for carriages that accommodate 72 passengers and probably carry scores of other unreserved commuters.

The spokesman of the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai told IPS that ICF only manufactures coaches for Indian Railways but is not responsible for the design of the carriages, nor the rolling stock – hardware such as wheels, steps or sleeper frames – within them.

The fact that the Railway Authority does not provide for the needs of physically challenged persons is hazardous to all passengers during emergencies and seriously hinders rescue operations – with the infirm or the disabled getting left behind, or other passengers stuck behind them.

The average height of the train floor is at least 1.5 metres above the ground. The steps are arranged more like a ladder than a staircase, making it impossible for physically challenged passengers to use them unassisted.

Though the mobile “medical relief van” stationed at all railway stations reached the burning train within minutes, they found they could not access the passengers inside, as the inflammable material and burning heat had caused the doors’ locks to melt and fuse together.

Ambulances rushed the critically injured survivors to the district general hospital after rescue teams cut through the burning car. If the fire had occurred in the countryside it would have led to far more casualties, experts say.

C. U. Rao, general secretary of the Indian Red Cross Andhra Pradesh chapter, the state where the tragedy occurred, told IPS, “The Nellore branch of the Indian Red Cross scurried to (transport) injured passengers to various hospitals, installed freezers to keep the corpses awaiting DNA identification, brought their mobile blood bank to the site of the disaster, and distributed food packets to survivors in the immediate aftermath of the calamity.”

But these services should be the responsibility of the railway authorities. Emergency equipment should be installed in every railway station across the country as part of disaster mitigation efforts, especially since the railway network has been responsible for the deaths of 1,200 people in the last five years alone according to statistics provided by Indian Railways.

Michael believes that “a review of design is urgently called for; hereafter we will have to heed attention to alternative designs.” Wide collapsible doors that automatically roll up in the event of fires are far more effective than doors that have to be opened manually.

Locks and emergency brakes need to be automated to ensure heat does not create vacuum chambers and seal doors shut.

If the Indian Railways fails to learn its lessons from tragedies like the one at Nellore, then it is condemning thousands of other passengers to a similar fate.

(END)

Almost 400,000 famine victims who fled to the Mogadishu for aid at the height of famine, are still living in one of the many refugee camps outside Mogadishu. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Abdurrahman Warsameh
MOGADISHU, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

One-year-old Miriam Jama is a symbol of life in Somalia after the famine. Born just as the United Nations World Food Programme declared famine in this Horn of Africa nation a year ago on Jul. 20, Miriam has known no other life than the one in the Badbaado refugee camp, situated 10 kilometres outside the country’s capital, Mogadishu.

Weak and visibly malnourished, Miriam, like the rest of her family, hardly have enough food to eat.

And like the almost 400,000 famine victims who fled to the city for aid at the height of the crisis, Miriam, her parents and four siblings are still living in one of the many refugee camps outside Mogadishu.

Here they live in squalor in a tiny shelter of only two square metres, in a camp that is run by self-appointed administrators who are often accused by the community of stealing aid.

“We get barely enough to keep alive. Famine may have ended, but for us hunger has not,” Hawa Jama, Miriam’s mother, tells IPS.

Jama says that her family receives only 25 kilogrammes of grain, 25 kgs of flour, and 10 litres of cooking oil for a month. It is hardly sufficient to feed this family of seven. But they are not the only ones hungry here.

As the WFP marks one year after famine was declared in Somalia on Friday, Jul. 20, hundreds of thousands of famine refugees living in camps outside of the capital say they still face hunger and desperation. The famine has claimed tens of thousands of Somalis, was declared in the war-torn nation as a result of a severe drought. The drought had been prevalent in entire Horn of Africa and was described as the worst in 60 years. It was compounded by high food prices and instability in the region.

The WFP said on Jul. 18 that although there is currently no famine in Somalia and malnutrition rates have improved considerably over the last year, the situation remains fragile and progress could be reversed if aid is not sustained.

The U.N. Refugee Agency reported on Jul. 18 that the Somali refugee population has exceeded one million. Kenya’s Dadaab refugee complex alone houses 570,000 people. And 3.8 million people in Somalia remain in crises and are in urgent need of assistance, while an estimated 325,000 children are acutely malnourished.

Dense shelters spanning as far as the eye can see have remained on the outskirts of Mogadishu a year after the crisis began.

But life in the camps is a difficult existence as refugees complain that camp administrators and local officials steal food aid and practice nepotism and favoritism in aid distribution.

“I don’t like to complain, but this is a matter of life and death for us. Those responsible for running our camp are not giving us all the aid and favour others. We tell every foreign official who comes to visit, but nothing is done about our predicament,” Mumino Ali, a mother of seven, tells IPS at Sayidka camp in Mogadishu.

Water and sanitation are also poor at the camps as the number of toilets remains inadequate, and the water trucked in does not meet the international requirement both in quality and quantity, says Mohamed Ali, a local human rights activist.

“I think what we have achieved since the famine was declared back in July last year is that people are not now dying because of hunger. But hunger is still there and there are no systematic programmes to help refugees stand on their feet by creating income schemes and repatriating them back to their communities,” Ali says.

The food situation has worsened as international aid agencies scaled down their humanitarian operations after the U.N. declared the end of the famine in February. In addition, the Somali government’s national Disaster Management Agency, which was formed to deal with the famine, has been called ineffective and corrupt.

“The agency has not been effective in its work and is one of the agencies that failed the people in need. Corruption is widespread among the organs of government and this agency has its share,” a local aid worker, who asked for anonymity, tells IPS.

The official says “layers of corruption” from international agencies, their local partners, government officials, as well as those running the camps continues the cycle of hunger for the displaced refugees.

In order to survive, many of the famine refugees seek out odd jobs. But unemployment is already rife among the general population of Mogadishu where 20 years of war has left the economic infrastructure in tatters. Even children can be seen at the city’s local markets offering their services as shoe shiners, housemaids and even car washers, as they attempt to earn a living to support their families.

Jama’s husband is one of the many who spend their days trying to find odd jobs in the capital city where he knows no-one and where work is hard to come by.

She says that she and her husband, former subsistence farmers from Somalia’s Middle Shabelle region, just north of Mogadishu, would rather that aid agencies helped them find a sustainable way of earning an income than merely giving them aid.

“I don’t want to be dependent on handouts from aid agencies, which are never enough here. But I would be happy if I got help in working to support my family and go back to my village,” Jama says as she carries Miriam on her hip.

The little girl was born a month before her family fled their hometown in August 2011, and Jama is anxious for her to know another, less-harsh way of life.

A reconstructed school at Chukchuka in Car Nicobar Island serves as an emergency shelter. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Jun 3 2012 (IPS)

Islanders on India’s Great Nicobar Island in the Bay of Bengal, barely 144 kilometres from Sumatra, fled when they felt the first tremors of the 8.6 magnitude earthquake on Apr. 11. They leaped across creeks inhabited by estuarine crocodiles, haunted by memories of the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami that took the lives of thousands of people.

The residents took refuge in shelters that lacked ‘earthquake safe’ certification. They were literally caught between the devil and the deep sea,  since a tsunami originating off Sumatra can arrive on the Great Nicobar Island within 15 to 20 minutes.

Though the tsunami didn’t come, the earthquake in April exposed many Indian Ocean littoral states’ lack of preparedness against increasingly frequent natural calamities.

Chief Secretary of the Andaman Nicobar Island (ANI) Administration, Shakti Sinha, said, “We did not issue a tsunami warning in Great Nicobar as (the wave) was likely to hit only the Island’s west coast that is devoid of inhabitants.”

“As per standard operational procedure, the Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) identified the regions under risk and issued warnings to only two Nicobar islands, where the public was advised to move to higher grounds,” T. Srinivas Kumar, oceanographer at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), informed IPS.

INCOIS is the official agency designated to map the tsunami hazard for all countries on the Indian Ocean Rim – Australia, Bangladesh, Comoros, Reunion Islands, Indonesia, India, Iran, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor Leste, Tanzania and Yemen.

INCOIS is responsible for the safety of 74.85 million coastal residents around the Indian Ocean. Sumatra’s coast has triggered the bulk of the world’s seismic tsunamis in the last millennium.

“The Administration’s actions conformed to National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA)’s and INCOIS’s guidelines; accordingly, islanders from Kamorta and Katchal were evacuated to safety swiftly,” Sinha confirmed.

But Zubair Ahmed, a journalist in Port Blair, told IPS that the absence “of mass transport vehicles for evacuation (shows) the challenge is now translating strategy into to action”.

For instance, India’s state-run TV Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) did not receive the official tsunami warning. Thanks to personal initiatives, Doordarshan was “ready with a text scroll and broadcast the first tsunami alert within 15 minutes of the warning”, station director Sajan Gopalan told IPS.

All India Radio in Port Blair aired no announcements about the tsunami warning. “ITEWC disseminates tsunami bulletins to all stakeholders, as mandated in the NDMA guidelines,” INCOIS’s Kumar clarified. That Doordarshan and AIR are not subscribing to early warning alerts highlights a glaring deficiency in disaster preparedness. AIR officials were unavailable for comment.

Ashok Sharma, director of the Directorate of Disaster Management (DDM) for ANI said “We are in the process of incorporating all departments for coordination.”

“The DDM will now upgrade technologies like mass (text messages), electronic display boards and loudspeakers for mass communication of early warning alerts,” Sharma added. The fact that these basic steps are being taken eight years after the Asian Tsunami shows negligence on the part of officials.

Following the tsunami in 2004, India’s Central Food Technology Research Institute “suggested” setting up 22 nationwide hubs for air-dropping culturally sensitive, nutritious, pre-cooked food packets during disasters, but this plan never materialised. However, “two months of supplies are available on all the islands,” Sharma assured IPS.

Still, the Island Administration has no temporary shelters on the disaster-prone islands because the “costs of constructing a second housing establishment for a rare natural calamity are prohibitive; instead government schools serve effectively because they have water supply, sanitation, storage space, and large halls,” Sinha explained.

India is not the only country unprepared for disasters. Sri Lanka’s chaotic traffic congestion during the Apr. 11 emergency prompted President Mahinda Rajapakse to instruct the “staff of the Disaster Management Centre to revise plans for traffic management during evacuation,” J.M.S. Jayaweera, director of the preparedness division of DMC Sri Lanka, told IPS.

In the Maldives, officials struggled to evacuate unevenly distributed populations in far-flung islands.

Meanwhile, an audit of disaster preparedness plans in the ANI betrays even more shortcomings.

The assets, liabilities and consumption patterns of Islanders have not been inventoried, thereby preventing speedy compensation. Surplus telecommunications spectrum for emergencies remains a pipe dream – the INCOIS website was jammed on Apr. 11. Only some earthquake shelters are certified. Without inter-agency coordination, the practice of mock drills every 12 weeks is futile. Without mass transportation systems, traffic management plans are meaningless.

Ambulances do not have state of the art equipment and the Islands themselves do not have an air ambulance. Helicopter services are almost exclusively reserved for bureaucrats, while ailing patients are forced to await the departure of weather-dependent ships, which defeats the purpose of emergency medical care.

Since natural calamities are so unpredictable, disaster mitigation calls for foolproof preparedness against every possible eventuality.

Years of scientific research, including the study of Cetacean stranding on beaches, volcanic activity and historic earthquake patterns, have not brought us any closer to earthquake prediction.

Indonesia sits on the Sunda Trench that is at the vertex of two tectonic plates. The continual thrust of the Sunda Plate against the Indian Plate “causes subduction of the latter under the Sunda Trench. That is the reason why the northwest coast of Sumatra is so prone to large earthquakes”, a study by the Tectonic Observatory of the Caltech University concluded after the Asian Tsunami.

The United States Geological Survey’s “history of earthquakes” database reveals a recurrence of major earthquakes on the 11^th and 26^th of almost every month.

Earthquakes have occurred on Feb. 11, Mar. 11, Apr. 11 and Aug. 11 in the Malacca Straits, and Dec. 11 in Taiwan. The Andaman earthquake struck on Jun. 26, 1941, the Great Alaska earthquake on Mar. 27th, 1964, the Assisi earthquake on Sept. 26, 1997, the Gujarat Earthquake on Jan. 26, 2001, the Bam earthquake on Dec. 26, 2003 and the Asian Tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. Large tsunamis have recurred in the same fault zone once in every 50-60-year cycle.

Considering that “the 2004 earthquake was only a partial rupture of the seismic stress” according to Caltech’s Tectonic Observatory, governments around the Indian Ocean need to be prepared for even worse disasters than those we have already seen.

*This is the first of a two-part series on hydrometeorological disasters in the Indian Ocean Rim.

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