Natural Disasters: Lessons From the Brink

The forthcoming report urges aid agencies and governments to allow people vulnerable to natural disasters to play a greater role in disaster management, a move that it said could lead to more effective recovery programs.

The report funded in part by the World Bank was conducted by the ProVention Consortium, an international network of public, private, non-governmental and academic organizations dedicated to reducing the impacts of disasters in developing countries.

It analyzed disaster responses in five countries that had been hard hit by natural disasters:

Disaster Recovery Process Little Understood

The report said "very substantial amounts of resources" were allocated to natural disaster recovery interventions. External agencies, including the World Bank, provided $US8.8 billion for the five disasters studied and significant extra funding came from governments, affected people's own savings and remittances from expatriates living overseas.

Most of the funding went to infrastructure and housing recovery efforts - areas that the report said play important roles in recovery and livelihood support.

According to the report, the recovery process after natural disasters was "little understood" and the lack of a systematic analysis of disaster recovery programs meant that mistakes were being repeated that could be avoided.

In all the cases studied, policies developed in the wake of the disasters havepaid more attention to risk reduction and preparedness. Countries are moving to treat disasters more as part of the development process. But the policies remainheavily focused on disaster coordination and planning and pay inadequate attention to supporting livelihoods and helping the affected communities participate in disaster management activities. There appeared to be limited cross-country learning about natural disaster policy, despite only a few agencies working in the field on the issue.

In general, rural communities that were agriculturally based with low levels of capital investment were better served than communities with more complex ways of making their livings such as in urban, semi-rural, and fishing communities.

More Consultation Needed

The report found that in the five countries examined there tended to be a lack of consultation with the affected population, resulting in inappropriate programs.

"Low levels of public participation in the planning, design, and in many cases implementation of recovery activities is a common and worrying theme across the case studies," the report found.

Positive Trends Emerge

• The Turkish Government was enforcing building codes in housing construction after the 1999 Marmara earthquake.
• In Bangladesh, the government's liberalization of food imports kept food prices down during the recovery after the 1998 floods.
• In India, after the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, the government allowed self-building of housing to speed the recovery process.

• In Mozambique opportunities were taken in recovery programs to build infrastructure that could better withstand future flooding.
• In Honduras, the distribution of radio equipment and motor boats (as well as training in their use and maintenance) helped to lessen the impacts of floods occurring since Hurricane Mitch.

Key Challenges

The report identified several challenges, including setting up sustainable disaster management institutions. Although disaster management institutions have been strengthened in all the case study countries, the report said they typically lack the capacity to help affected populations become involved in the planning, design and implementation of disaster preparation activities. It expressed concern that there might not be adequate political pressure to fund disaster management initiatives in the periods between events.

What Needs to be Done

• governments to make natural hazard risk analysis and reduction an integral part of the development process.
• more independent reviews of recovery efforts after major disasters including an analysis by socio-economic group, sex, and ethnicity to ensure lessons were learned from disaster response experiences.
• more attention to be paid to supporting the livelihoods of the affected populations.
• mechanisms for periodic updating of damage and needs assessments to ensure a more comprehensive understanding of a sometimes shifting situation.
• the impact of disasters on women to be more closely examined and the "window of opportunity" that disasters open for social change and gender equality should be fully utilized.

Good Practice Case Study: Keeping Food Prices Down in Bangladesh

Bangladesh was able to keep food prices down after the 1998 floods by promoting private sector imports of rice. Trade liberalization in the early 1990s had allowed private traders to import and export food grains. And when the country faced a shortfall of 2.2 million tones of rice, the government promoted the private imports through the removal of a 2.5 percent development surcharge on rice imports. Between July 1998 and April 1999, private sector imports equaled 2.42 million tones and government imports 399,000 million tones. The private sector was able to import cereals within two to three weeks whereas government imports through formal tender processes took three to four months.

In the 1974 rice famine, the average price of rice rose 12 percent per month for the first 10 months of the year, despite adequate food stocks being available. In the 1998 crisis, rice prices remained stable.

Good Practice Case Study: Building Infrastructure in Mozambique

In the wake of the 2000 and 2001 floods, Mozambique rehabilitated and reconstructed damaged infrastructure including schools, health posts, water supplies, and roads. This was welcomed by communities. The funding available through recovery programs made it not only possible to repair or replace existing infrastructure, usually to higher standards, but to build new facilities where none existed before. In areas where additional facilities were built these were provided in line with previously identified priorities, and the human and financial resources were made available to staff the new facilities. For example:

• In Chokwe, in the country's south, 249 new classrooms were built in the recovery phase. In total, 101 schools were rehabilitated and constructed and equipment for the schools provided. An extra 4500 children were enrolled at schools in the district.
• Malaria prevention activities were expanded to cover the whole Gaza province, in the country's south, under the National Malaria Control Program.
• Remote communities had roads reconstructed and some new roads built.

Related Links
Eluding Nature's Wrath
Reconstruction Process Underway in Bam, Iran
Risk Management: a Proactive Approach
Cost of Natural Disasters
Earthquakes in Turkey
Youth Design Risk Management Projects
Natural Disasters: Resource Links