Mangrove forests effectively shielded some coastal areas from the Asian tsunami, while those areas without mangrove cover suffered immense damage. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

In commemoration of the eighth anniversary of the Asian tsunami, Wednesday was a day of prayer and mourning across the Andaman Nicobar Islands – located at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea – and south India’s coastal Tamil Nadu state, two areas that suffered thousands of casualties on that fateful day.

Also known as the ‘Boxing Day Tsunami’, the gigantic waves claimed 230,000 lives across South and Southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004. While the northern Andaman Islands were largely spared the pounding, the southern Nicobar Islands were virtually flattened by the tsunami.

As the islanders remembered their dead, they also noted with gratitude that which spared them even more destruction – the mangrove forests that shielded the islands from the killer waves.

Rana Mathew, former Public Relations Officer of ANI, told IPS, “The mangroves played a crucial role in saving the North Andaman Islands from the tsunami waters. The thick mangrove forest surrounding the island chain provided a protective cover… saving many lives.”

“Mangroves act as a living buffer, or bioshield, preventing coastal erosion and damage to infrastructure and loss of life by reducing the force of the winds and waves passing through them; so that there is much less damage inland from these destructive forces of nature,” Alfredo Quarto, executive director of the Mangrove Action Project (USA), told IPS.

“In Thailand, damage to the mangrove-lined coast up to a certain distance inland is documented; evidence suggests that mangrove forests prevented further damage inland. The brunt of the wave force did not pass further inland and was seemingly dissipated by the first line of mangrove defence,” he added.

Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle in Port Blair, recounted the horror he experienced eight years ago: “I was asleep when the earthquake struck. I took out my camera and rushed to the Haddo Wharf where a building had collapsed, trapping people. Commotion ruled. Two ships collided.

“I noticed a ripple in the sea, and then water gushed inland. The Chatham Bridge disappeared under the seawater. Radio reports said the Nicobars had vanished. It felt like the world was going to end…mangroves certainly helped save human habitation in the Andamans,” he told IPS.

Great Nicobar – the southernmost island, nearest to the epicentre in Sumatra – was engulfed, possibly because the mangroves bordering the island had been destroyed in favour of building a helipad, school and hospital.

“Nowhere was the violence of the tsunami felt more than in Katchal and Trinket, except perhaps the Great Nicobar Island. Trinket Island was trifurcated and declared unfit for human habitation by the (Indian) Administration. Yet within two years the people of Trinket returned and recolonised the trifurcated Trinket, which was saved by the mangroves,” Samir Acharya of the Society for Andaman Nicobar Ecology (SANE) told IPS.

“The destroyed mangroves are coming up again, perhaps as insurance against any future tsunami. The biggest contribution of the mangroves was protection of the freshwater source, which made recolonisation possible. The large area of mangroves in Katchal substantially reduced the impact of the tsunami and the island would probably be depopulated if the mangroves were not there.”

According to the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s ‘Toolkit for Establishing Coastal Bioshields’, “Walls of water 10 metres (33 feet) high penetrated up to three kilometres inland in some islands, causing extensive damage in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Pondicherry.”

“Almost 154,000 houses were either destroyed or damaged, entailing losses of about 228.5 million dollars. The tsunami destroyed or damaged nearly 75,300 fishing crafts including wooden catamarans, mechanised boats and trawlers worth about 215 million dollars; fishing gear worth 15 million dollars were also lost leading to loss of livelihood for thousands of fishing families.”

The experience of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands eight years ago point the way forward for disaster management policy in India, which cannot afford to become complacent and allow its coastal inhabitants to suffer similar destruction in the case of another disaster.

Environmental scientists and researchers believe that policies to tackle the threat of another tsunami need only turn to natural ecosystems for advice.

Dr. V. Selvam, lead author of the Toolkit and director of coastal systems research at MSSRF, singled out the experiences of two villages in Tamil Nadu as examples of the effectiveness of mangrove forests. The first village, T.S. Pettai, suffered little loss of life and property thanks to the presence of mangroves, whereas the mangrove-bereft Muzhukkuthurai village experienced much destruction.

“Eleven people died and 136 houses (88 percent of the village) were totally damaged due to the tsunami in Muzhukkuthurai village,” Selvam told IPS, whereas T.S. Pettai reported no deaths.

Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, reiterates the role of bioshields in disaster mitigation. “Coral reefs absorb dynamic forces like tsunamis and cyclones. The Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, comprised largely of an underwater reef, effectively prevented damage from the tsunami while the absence of such reefs north of Rameshwaram saw widespread damage to the coastal communities: Nagapatnam was devastated by the tsunami.”

“The December 2004 tsunami brought home the role mangroves can play in reducing the damage to life and property of coastal communities. Although a tsunami is a rare occurrence, India’s coasts are regularly under threat from various other natural hazards such as cyclones, storms, sea surges and flooding, which cause heavy damages to property and human lives,” Dr. Gladwin G. Asir, a marine geologist who worked with the Tuticorin-based NGO Peoples’ Action for Development, told IPS.

The fact that neither the Government of India nor state governments have acknowledged the role mangroves can play in disaster mitigation speaks volumes for the political will to implement effective disaster risk reduction policies in the country.

Survivors of the 2010 eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia pick through the rubble. Credit: European Commission DG ECHO/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
PAGER JURANG, Indonesia, Dec 25 2012 (IPS)

From her half-built house, Ari Haryani takes a few steps to reach a freshly cemented path that snakes through the narrow, dusty walkways of this resettlement village. The path offers the 36-year-old a route to safety in case the nearby Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, erupts.

“It has given us some security,” says the mother of three, referring to the path, one of the many features taking shape to aid this community of 380 homes. “We know what to do and where to run when there is another eruption. Even my children know.”

Evacuation drills have also become part of Ari’s regular rhythm as she and her family continue to rebuild their life on this sloppy terrain after their former village, closer to the towering Merapi, was buried under the searing heat of pyroclastic flows and ash when the volcano last roared to life in October 2010.

That eruption killed close to 350 people and destroyed nearly 10,000 homes over a 15-kilometre radius from the mountain’s crater.

But these efforts in Pager Jurang and other villages — including building community health centres capable of treating patients for burns and respiratory problems – mark a departure from the usual rehabilitation drives that follow disasters. The customary top-down role asserted by officials in the capital, Jakarta, has given way to planning shaped by local communities and local governments.

“The local people had a central role in determining what their village needs so they own this disaster risk reduction programme,” Rio Rahadi, a civil engineer with a local reconstruction and rehabilitation agency, told IPS. “They requested what they wanted to reduce casualties the next time the volcano erupts.”

Such a shift in this corner of Southeast Asia’s largest archipelago – and one of its most disaster-prone regions – affirms a pattern gaining momentum across Asia: local communities and governments are discovering their voice and weight to build resilience.

“Decentralisation is the trend across Asia and that has led to greater efforts by local communities to organise themselves and demand resources for disaster reduction,” says Vinod Thomas, director general for independent evaluation at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. “How local communities react makes a big difference in building resiliency.”

Yet government funding remains slow for these bottom-up initiatives for communities exposed to disasters ranging from storms, floods and earthquakes to tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. “Funding communities to reduce vulnerability is not as visible and political as reacting and helping after a disaster,” Thomas told IPS.

New studies are now questioning the top-down approach, since local communities are the most vulnerable to disasters in Asia.

“The impacts of disasters on communities need to be better understood for practical action,” argues Debby Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a Brussels-based think tank.

“(In 2012) some high risk countries in the region have made significant progress in controlling disaster impacts. This means that preparedness and prevention measures can be effective.”

“Actions on the ground by local governments and local communities are huge in reducing vulnerability,” adds Jerry Velasquez, head of the Asia-Pacific division of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). “Governments are steadily becoming more aware of these realities, but there are still gaps.”

New reports exposing the fact the Asia is the “world’s most disaster-prone region” – with floods being the most frequent disaster, having the highest human and economic impact in 2012 – have started to turn the heat up on regional governments.

“(Floods) accounted for 54 percent of the death toll in Asia, 78 percent of people affected and 56 percent of all economic damages in the region,” according to data released this month by UNISDR and CRED.

In southern, southeastern and eastern Asia, 83 disasters caused 3,103 deaths affected a total of 64.5 million people and triggered 15.1 billion dollars in damages in 2012.

“Globally, these three regions accounted for 57 percent of the total deaths, 74 percent of the affected people and 34 percent of the total economic damages caused by disasters in the first 10 months of 2012,” according to the data.

The Asia-Pacific region is the most disaster prone area in the world and it is also the most seriously affected one, states another report released recently by UNISDR and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a Bangkok-based U.N. regional body. “Almost two million people were killed in disasters between 1970 and 2011, representing 75 percent of all disaster fatalities globally.”

The most frequent hazards to torment Asians are “hydro-meteorological”, with more than 1.2 billion people being exposed to such hazards since 2000, through 1,215 disasters, compared to the 355 million people exposed to 394 “climatological, biological and geophysical disaster events during the same period,” according to the 134-page report.

“People and governments alike are still struggling to understand how the various components of risk –hazards, vulnerability and exposure – interact to create recurrent disasters.”

With disasters on the rise, community-led responses – such as those in Pager Jurang – are invaluable.

“Early warning and contingency works only if acted upon by local governments and local communities,” says Velasquez of UNISDR.

(END)

A wilting mangrove forest in Car Nicobar, destroyed by the Asian Tsunami in 2004. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 14 2012 (IPS)

The heat wave in the Indian state of Orissa, which saw a 10-degree Celsius increase in summer temperatures last month, claimed 21 lives, according to government sources; unofficial estimates counted 87 deaths.

Prafulla Ratha the team leader of emergency services at Concern Worldwide in Bhubaneswar, told IPS that one of the factors responsible for the fatalities was “workers not heeding the government’s advice regarding working hours and necessary preventive measures”.

But according to environmental experts, the problem was not desperately impoverished workers who could not afford to lose a day’s wages; rather it was the failure of disaster management to adequately plan for the heat wave, which was just one of the many hydrometeorological disasters that affected – and will continue to impact – Indian Ocean rim countries.

Orissa is the capital of disaster management. Forty-nine of the last 100 years saw floods, 30 years were drought-ridden, and 11 years faced cyclones.

A supercyclone that hit the state in 1999 claimed 15,000 lives, 2.5 million heads of livestock and 90 million trees.

Building resilience via strong disaster management policies, plans and action in the future will be crucial to avoiding such destruction in the future.

Indian ocean rim at risk

About 74.85 million people living on coastal areas in the 24 Indian Ocean rim Countries (IOC) are vulnerable to hydrometeorological disasters, making effective disaster management one of the most pressing issues of the day.

Most disasters affecting IOC countries include water and weather related calamities such as avalanches, cloudburst, coastal incursions, cyclones, drought, desertification, floods, flash floods, famine, hurricanes, storms, sea surge, tornadoes, tsunamis, and typhoons.

Such catastrophes destroy lives, property, and livelihoods in the short term and take a deadly toll on whole economies and national resilience in the long term. But planning ahead for such events has proved to be extremely difficult.

Unpredictable El Niño South Oscillation originating in the southeastern Pacific Ocean every few years upsets weather differentially around the world every time it occurs.

B.N. Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, told IPS, “Weather and climate can never be predicted perfectly. El Niño and La Niña are strongly related to occurrence of drought or floods over Indonesia and northern Australia and less strongly associated with drought or floods over India and eastern Africa. The impact over Sri Lanka tends to be generally opposite to that over India.”

If floods devastate India, Sri Lanka will likely experience drought in that same period, but predicting this accurately is still impossible today.

The vagaries of the weather can have tumultuous effects on agriculture, trade, industrial production, tourism, fisheries, demography, and the economy.

“The impacts of El Niño during winter are warm conditions over south Asia, dry and warm conditions over southeast Asia and southeast Africa, and dry conditions over north Australia,” said L.S. Rathore, director general of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).

Glenn Cook, manager of Western Australia Climate Services in the Bureau of Meteorology, told IPS, “Over the past five years, the most notable hydrometeorological event would be the extremely dry year in 2010 in Western Australia since records commenced in 1900.

“Horticultural crops were destroyed (by) flooding in the Gascoyne River and at least 2000 cattle drowned. Whilst the major town of Carnarvon was protected by levies, estimates of the damage caused by the flooding were in the order of 100 million (Australian) dollars,” he added.

A full year after El Niño ceased, Western Australia endured its highest recorded temperatures during the late summer (February) of 2012.

But unlike Australia, most coastal communities around IOC lack resilience.

The flooding of the Kosi River, after its dam burst in August 2008, was a preventable disaster of tragic proportions that claimed 434 lives, left three million people homeless, ruined 340,000 hectares of farmland, damaged 300,000 structures and affected the livelihoods of 2.3 million people.

Flash floods in Karnataka’s drought-ridden districts in October 2009 claimed 36 lives, left 86 missing and submerged 11 districts, ruining thousands of acres of farmland. Reasons for the flash flood were soil erosion, desertification and dam mismanagement in the upper and lower riparian states – in other words, the disaster was entirely preventable.

Similarly, the Thai floods of October 2011 became a disaster when the receding floodwaters were blocked by man-made structures.

“Some types of extreme weather and climate events have increased in frequency or magnitude (and) populations and assets at risk have also increased,” according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

Long-term disaster management

“Crop insurance (and) contingency funds are necessary policy initiatives,” said R.S. Deshpande, director of the Bangalore-based Institute of Socio-Economic Change.

Mitigating flash floods requires sustained desilting of water bodies. “Dams effectively mitigate floods. Prevention of soil erosion, afforestation, and strengthening embankments also go a long way,” R.C. Jha, chairman of India’s Central Water Commission (CWC) told IPS.

IMD undertakes “observation and collection of hydrometeorological data, transmission of data to forecasting centres and dissemination of hydrometeorological bulletins, including forecasts, to flood forecasting centres of CWC,” Senior Scientist of the Hydrometeorological Division of IMD in New Delhi, Surinder Kaur, told IPS.

But IMD’s exhaustive database is unable to indicate weather patterns. It was not able to predict the severity of Orissa’s supercyclone of October 1999 and the Thai floods last year, both of which had their genesis in a tropical cyclone originating off the Malay Peninsula on Oct. 18 of the respective years.

It is thus clear that a database of rainfall patterns is necessary. Without data analysis or interpretation, data collection will remain a fruitless exercise.

Further aggravating the situation is India’s economic growth that leaves no space for forests and carbon sinks, both vital components in mitigating climate change.

Forests disappear and bioshields wilt, eroding topsoil and river embankments. Years of political connivance with encroachers, corruption and negligence means that dams, reservoirs, lake systems and storm water drains have not been desilted for decades, embankments and river shores are not strengthened and catchment areas, water weirs and drainage basins are encroached upon.

Rajan Joshua a pioneer in watershed management in Andhra Pradesh’s desertified Anantapur district, said, “Watershed management, rainwater harvesting, desilting of all water bodies, ecological succession of endemic biodiversity, and clearance of all encroachment in the catchment area help in mitigating desertification (in the) long term.”

V.S. Prakash, director of the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre in Bangalore, added, “Drought management in the country primarily hinges on integrated sectoral water resources management and coordination between science, the administration, legal framework, political systems and communities.”

Preparedness for hydrometeorological disasters lies in reducing biodiversity loss, husbanding bioshields, strengthening river embankments, fiscal incentives, mitigating desertification and drought, soil conservation, weather forecasting, record keeping, building resilience, urban planning, corruption- free administration and foolproof inter-agency coordination.

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