Continued from the previous page
In part the answer is that a terrible civil war raged in El Salvador until 1992. Since the end of that war, UN agencies have been very much involved with the post-war recovery process and the building-up of the civilian administrative, legislative and judicial institutions that are necessary for the maintenance of peace and good governance. These are the same institutions that are needed to apply existing knowledge to reducing the impacts of earthquakes and other extreme events such as hurricane Mitch (1998). After that hurricane, El Salvador was in an ideal position to make a quantum leap in its preparedness for not only the next hurricane, but the next earthquake, volcanic eruption or season of extreme El Niņo weather.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch in Honduras (Nigel Dickinson/International Red Cross).
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El Salvador had not suffered the extreme devastation of Honduras and Nicaragua, yet it was an integral part of new donor attention in Central America to making mitigation of risk a mainstream part of planning. Good urban planning, good land use and environmental management — what one might call "sustainable development" — were encouraged by institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the Stockholm group of donors.
If knowledge, institutions and finance were available, what else has been missing in El Salvador, India and elsewhere in the world where disasters continue to plague humanity?
All this said, what more could the United Nations family do? UN agencies have provided three kinds of things so far: technical knowledge, support for institution-building, and financial assistance through grants and loans. These are necessary, but they are not sufficient to initiate the sea change in how nations deal with natural hazards. The missing ingredient is the kind of moral imperative that can mobilize local political will. It is when the world at large agrees to standards of responsibility by nation States toward their citizens in the form of treaties, covenants and other agreements that this moral force is felt most strongly.
Why then not set our sights on an international treaty that commits Governments around the world to apply low-cost solutions based on available knowledge to prevent such tragic loss?
There are networks of scientists and engineers who could take on the technical work of defining these standards. These networks were created in part by the IDNDR — 10 years of scientific exchange mandated by the United Nations. However, this International Decade left unfinished business. Science was exchanged all right, but generally it has not been applied. Such an effort would require thousands of experts to work out the low-cost, minimum practices required to avoid further tragedies. These scientists and engineers would have to sit down with lawyers, legislators and policy experts to work out how the minimum standards would be enforced. The devil is in the details, but scientists and lawyers eat details for breakfast.
Aftermath of floods in Venzuela (courtesy of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies).
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This is not an impossible task. It has happened before. One recent example is exchange among hundreds of agencies that work in humanitarian and disaster relief, which led to agreement on a very detailed set of minimum technical standards for relief. Known as the SPHERE project, its published document covers food, water, shelter, health care and many other aspects of relief. There are also many internationally agreed safety standards for the chemical, airline and nuclear power industries, etc. It has already happened where global warming is concerned.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has mobilized thousands of scientists, and their work has gone into the treaty-making process that led to the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions.
Could the United Nations not create a parallel intergovernmental panel on natural disaster that would, in a similar way, act to mobilize existing knowledge and feed it into a treaty-making process? Such a body is necessary because so many different kinds of knowledge and expertise are required. No single existing specialized agency of the United Nations, such as UNESCO, the UN Environment Programme, the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization, covers all the specialist knowledge that would be required. That is one of the reasons that the IPCC was created.
Preparing for the impacts of global warming requires many kinds of knowledge, from areas such as public health, economics, agriculture and oceanography, in addition to expert understanding of world and regional climate.
Aftermath of earthquake in Turkey (courtesy of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies).
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What is to be done during the many years that such a treaty would be in the making? The beauty of this process is that the low-cost solutions will filter out into society. Citizens groups will demand action by their Governments, as they did in Turkey, where it became clear that contractors had not followed building codes and had used low-quality materials; or in South Florida where it came to light that poor construction methods were responsible for much avoidable damage during hurricane Andrew.
Prevention of disasters has to come from the bottom up, as well as from the top down. Absolute safety is not a human right. Safety from avoidable loss, injury and death is. Nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes much sense if human beings who are supposed to enjoy these rights can be snuffed out because the Government neglected to enforce its own building codes.
More information is available at www/anglia.ac.uk/
geography/radix.
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Selected readings on disaster management, compiled by Ben Wisner:
Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I., Wisner, B. 1994. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters. London: Routledge.
Boyce, James K. 2000. Let Them Eat Risk? Wealth, Rights and Disaster Vulnerability, Disasters 24,3, pp. 254-261.
Comfort, L. et al. 1999. Reframing Disaster Policy: The Global Evolution of Vulnerable Communities. Environmental Hazards 1, 39-44.
Eade, D. and Williams, S. 1995. The Oxfam Handbook of Development and Relief. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxfam Publications.
Enarson, E. and Morrow, B., eds. 1998. The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women's Eyes. Miami, FL: International Hurricane Center [http://www.ihc.fiu.edu/].
Hardoy, J., et al. 2000. Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World. London: Earthscan.
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). 2000. Facing the Challenge of Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: an IDB Action Plan. Washington, D.C. [http://www/iadb.org/sds/env ].
Maskrey, A. 1989. Disaster Mitigation: A Community Based Approach. Oxford: Oxfam.
Noji, E., ed. 1997. The Public Health Consequences of Disasters. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). 2000. Natural Disasters: Protecting the public's health. Washington, D.C.
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Highlights from the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction
The International Strategy For Disaster Reduction (ISDR) is an internationally concerted action in disaster reduction, proposed by the UN Secretary-General in pursuance of Economic and Social Council resolution 1999/63. The ISDR also builds on the IDNDR Programme Forum (Geneva, 5-9 July 1999) and its specific outcomes, namely the Geneva Mandate on Disaster Reduction and A Safer World in the 21st Century: Risk and Disaster Reduction, the strategy document.
Two-fold objectives of ISDR: disaster prevention and improving resiliency of communities. ISDR proposes a shift from a culture of reaction to hazards to one of risk management and prevention; aims at improving access of science and technology for risk reduction in local communities and desires to reduce vulnerability of societies to both natural and technological hazards through proactive rather than reactive approaches. Related past projects that have been carried out are the RADIUS initiative for urban Seismic assessment and the El Niņo inter-agency preventive approach.
ISDR relies on input of experts from multi-disciplinary and intersectoral relationships. It also counts on the cooperation of political decision makers and public confidence. Its procedures include:
– Increasing public awareness;
– Obtaining commitment of public authorities to reduce risks to people;
– Engaging public participation at all levels to create disaster resistant communities through increased partnership and expanded risk-reduction network;
– Integrating risk prevention into sustainable development;
– Reducing economic and social losses of disasters.
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Number 4 2000
