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Disaster management and risk reduction

Agencies should listen to the affected people when designing aid programs. Unwillingness to handover decision-making power to affected communities, or to impose inappropriate codes and standards, is likely to distance the communities and thus upset the program.
Z. A. Khan
EVERY day each one of us faces some degree of risk and hazards of one kind or another. Hazards arise from the society (terrorism, civil strife), from technology (industrial and transport accident), from environment (flood, drought, earthquake) and from threats to public health.
How we manage the risk and hazards has become a subject of research and debate in recent years. Is this highlighted attention or just a passing trend? Or does it signify that our world has become a more dangerous place?
On average, about 80,000 people are killed every year by natural disasters, and the number of people affected by disaster, and the associated economic losses, has soared. During the nineties, nearly three times more people were affected annually by natural disasters than during the seventies. Economic loss from such disasters in the nineties was nearly 5 times higher in real terms than in the seventies.
The costs inflicted on human livelihoods and social capital costs paid by families and communities are almost incalculable. Furthermore, even the most reliable disaster strategies cannot reveal the full impact of natural hazards on society because many hazards fall below the arbitrarily defined threshold of what constitutes a disaster. Now that the monsoon is here we should get prepared for any natural disaster.
A disaster is a situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request for national or international assistance. For a disaster to be recorded at least one of the following criteria has to be fulfilled:
• 10 or more people reported killed.
• ipO people reported affected, needing survival needs like food, shelter was and immediate medical support.
• A call for international assistance.
• Declaration ofa state of emergency. The field of disaster management is vast. It encompasses planning and activities of pre, during and post disaster periods. The major objectives of disaster manage- ment are to:
• Conduct studies for risk mitigation and reduction.
• Arrange coordination among the agencies that participate in the mitigation of the sufferings of the affected.
• Propose plans for attainable disaster response.
• Develop volunteerism and arrange training for volunteers.
• Adopt schemes for capacity building of organisations and the vulnerable.
• Develop agencies to alleviate human problems associated with disasters.
• Fix priorities for disaster management.
• Inculcate a sense of dignity in the vulnerable through local participation.
The chief objective of disaster management is risk reduction. Certain things have to be put together so that management is comprehensive, timely, attainable and sustainable. They are:
• National disaster preparedness (DP) plans and management.
• Disaster mitigation Plan (MP).
• Assess areas of risk during rehabilitation.
• Coordination and local participation tn assessment.
• Hazard proof infrastructure.
Even though disasters pose threat to lives, livelihood and development, there remains a lack of commitment to risk reduction. Some reasons for this are:
• Geo-political concerns.
• Absence ofrisk reduction community.
• Risk reduction is viewed as technical problem.
• Lack of resources committed to risk reduction.
Disaster response involves quick provisioning of relief materials and other supports. These enable the victims to overcome the psychological feeling of becoming destitute. Probable activities could be:
• Providing food, pure water, first aid and overhead protection.
• Visits by officials and volunteers to assure victims that they are there to help them overcome the trauma and to redress their difficulties.
• Assessment of the extent of damage, and obtaining necessary details to help prepare appeals for sustained support.
• Arrangement of evacuation of those needing hospitalisation.
• Arrangement for tracing out missing persons.
• Arrangement for disposal of the dead.
• Organising a coordination body to ensure proper utilisation of services of different organisations.
People displaced by disasters have their own coping strategies. Recent experience in the Balkans or South Asia highlights the need to involve such communities at the planning stage. Agencies' failure to engage crisis-affected people in meaningful dialogue about their needs and capacities can prove frustrating and even dangerous. Agencies find it difficult to assess the beneficiaries' needs adequately, and do not take sufficient note of local capacities and resources.
Agencies should listen to the affected people when designing aid programs. Unwillingness to handover decisionmaking power to affected communities, or to impose inappropriate codes and standards, is likely to distance the communities and thus upset the program.
Agencies must seek the views of the. affected people on:
• Their priorities and preferences.
• Their concerns and complaints.
• Their perception of the impact of aid programs.
• How they see the relationship between aid provider and aid
recipient.
• Their suggestions on how to improve aid delivery, or to help themselves better.
• How to conduct impact assessment with affected people to enable mapping of strategies.
Good governance is a necessary requirement for reducing risk, but may be difficult to ensure. Therefore, I highlight what is known as "Golden Dozen of Key Features of good governance":
• Social cohesion and solidarity (selfhelp and citizen based social protection at the neighbourhood level).
• Trust between the authorities and the civil society.
• Investment in economic development that takes the consequences of risk reduction or increase into account.
• Investment in human development and social capital.
• Investment in institutional capital (e.g. capable, accountable and transparent government institutions for mitigating disasters).
• Coordination, information sharing and cooperation among institutions involved in risk reduction.
• Attention to the most vulnerable groups and lifeline infrastructure.
• An effective risk communication*f system and institutionalised historical memory of disasters.
• Political commitment to risk reduction.
• Laws, regulations and directives to support other features that have been discussed so far.
ZA Khan is a former Director General of BUSS