A child injured in the Gujarat earthquake (courtesy of UNICEF/Paula Bronstein/Liaison)

In India, the same scenario was repeated on an even greater scale in Gujarat: 12,000 bodies have been recovered from the ruins of apartment houses, hospitals and smaller residences. The final number could reach 100,000. An area the size of Wales or West Virginia has been reduced to rubble.

These terrible losses were not necessary.

It is not part of the human condition to be buried under a landslide triggered by an earthquake.

Earthquakes happen. But disaster follows because of human action and inaction.

In the case of the middle-income neighbourhood of Las Colinas in Santa Tecla, just outside El Salvador's capital San Salvador, 400 homes were lost beneath debris from a collapsing slope above.

This was not an "act of God".

UN Photo

Road-building, deforestation and property development on the slope above Las Colinas should never have been allowed. These activities in a high-risk environment almost certainly contributed to the instability of the steep slope. In fact, a group of Las Colinas residents and environmental groups were in court in 2000 to stop development on that slope and the ridge above. The judge ruled against them. Experts agree that steep slopes made of volcanic soil are unstable. Geologists know this. Planners know this.

It is not an "act of God" that no more than 10 per cent of the multi-storey structures in Indian cities are built according to earthquake resistant norms.

The earthquake didn't kill, but the buildings did.

In El Salvador and Gujarat, hungry rural people have been searching for work in the cities, living in makeshift dwellings in some of the most potentially dangerous areas in an earthquake, with little resources or initiative to make their homes safer, on land they do not own. And the middle class is attracted to the rapidly growing edge of the sprawling cities. Developers rush to fill this market demand, often in too much haste to observe building codes. This is where the landslide buried hundreds in Las Colinas and where new apartment houses for Ahmedabad's salaried workers came crashing down. In both recent earthquakes, hospitals either collapsed, killing patients and staff, as in the city of Bhuj in Gujarat, or they became useless because of damage. The main medical laboratory in El Salvador's capital is unable to function because bottles of chemicals for medical tests were not secured on their shelves with simple restraints. Forty per cent of El Salvador's health care facilities suffered disabling damage. Yet it is very well known how to protect health care structures and their non-structural elements.

So, what has the United Nations family been doing? Many agencies within the UN family joined with other international scientific and humanitarian organizations, national committees, non-governmental organizations and citizen groups in an effort called the IDNDR, or the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-1999). Point of fact: The combined cost of disasters worldwide, according to the Center for Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium, was $741 billion in this period, in terms of human lives 589,000. The number of deaths has climbed each year since 1994. Remember, these are officially reported deaths; the actual number could be even higher.

But, another point of fact: This period was one of accelerated and intensive international exchanges of scientific information. More than enough knowledge was generated, refined, debated, systematized and disseminated to have prevented the loss of life in the landslide in Las Colinas. That knowledge could have dramatically reduced the number of lives claimed in Gujarat, and it certainly could have protected priority infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals.

Going into the IDNDR, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) had already begun to accumulate a vast amount of detailed advice about protecting hospitals. They were spurred on by the collapse of two major hospitals in Mexico City in 1985, one of which had been the principal maternity hospital. The world still remembers images of the handful of "miracle babies" who were rescued from under the massive concrete slabs. Three large volumes of guidelines are available gratis from PAHO in Spanish and Portuguese.

Why, one must ask, wasn't this knowledge put to use in El Salvador and, by extension through the rest of the World Health Organization, applied to the major civilian hospital in Bhuj?

Turkey earthquake/Federation

During the IDNDR, schools were also a priority focus. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had a programme for strengthening schools, and the Organization of American States has an initiative that is attempting to do the same thing, just to mention two.

In its last five years, the IDNDR gave much attention to public education, and in its last three years it developed a comprehensive project for urban earthquake risk reduction called RADIUS. Nine pilot cities took part, with another 84 associate cities. Where it worked best, as in Tijuana, Mexico and Izmir, Turkey, there was strong support from the local administration and many local universities and professional groups. The project developed a low-cost method of anticipating urban earthquake damage and loss, and a model for creating an action plan to mitigate those losses. Tijuana is about the same size as San Salvador, the distance between them is not so great and the language is the same. Why, one has to wonder, were the methods developed by RADIUS in Tijuana not applied in San Salvador?

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.