The disaster in Asia: the implications for preparedness and contingency planning

When the international community gathers in Kobe, Japan, for the World Conference on Disaster Reduction on 18–22 January 2005, it will be too soon to assess the full impact of the 26 December tsunami, or its long-term consequences.

Nevertheless, the event may still have a major impact. The Kobe conference had threatened to be bland and uncontroversial – the draft framework for action 2005–2015 tabled for approval is rather tame – but now the pressure of public concern may force the governments and international agencies taking part to make stronger commitments to long-term disaster reduction.

The primary lesson likely to be drawn at Kobe is simple and obvious: there should be much greater investment in disaster preparedness and mitigation measures that can save lives and reduce damage.

There are certainly plenty of challenges in operationalising the wide range of methods and practices that can be used to do this, but there seems to be a growing consensus among agencies and academics behind a comprehensive approach to disaster risk management, one which locates it more firmly within development planning and processes. The tsunami does not change our basic thinking about how to approach disaster reduction, but it does remind us how badly it is needed.

But beyond this ‘more of the same’ message, are there particular issues arising from the tsunami that merit a higher place on the international agenda? At first sight, two stand out.

The first is the transnational nature of the disaster. Disaster risk management requires extensive collaboration between all the relevant stakeholders. Creating effective partnerships of this kind is acknowledged to be a major challenge – all the more so when it involves several countries which may differ widely in their political, institutional and social circumstances.

To date, most international support has gone into building national-level structures. Whilst there are examples of transnational initiatives (e.g. the Mekong River Commission’s work on flood risks in the Mekong Basin) and some evidence of how effective transnational collaboration can be (e.g. the Southern African Development Coordination Conference’s drought mitigation efforts in the early 1990s), this area has been largely neglected by analysts. We need to know much more about how to make transnational processes and systems work.

Second, we must ask what impact post-tsunami recovery and disaster reduction efforts will have on the vulnerability of those at risk. Most disasters see some groups in society being discriminated against when relief aid is distributed, on account of factors such as ethnicity, caste, gender, political allegiance, age or disability.

Anecdotal evidence of this is already appearing from the tsunami-affected countries. Moreover, the history of previous disasters offers little to make us confident that long-term recovery efforts will pay sufficient attention to issues of social justice and equity. There are no more grounds for optimism in expecting these efforts to make communities more resilient to future disasters. Indeed, there are already fears in some aid agency circles that élite groups will take advantage of the tsunami to deprive poor coastal fishing communities of their land rights, under pretence of protecting them against future hazard events.

The current Kobe agenda is strongly slanted towards disaster reduction as a management issue. It skates around the uncomfortable problem that human vulnerability to disasters is to a very large extent the product of human actions: in particular, political, economic and social processes that undermine resilience and coping capacities.

Finally, we can expect a lot of talk at Kobe about early warning systems. Almost certainly, governments and the international community will repeat their commitment made at the 6 January meeting in Jakarta to establishing a tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean and South-east Asia region.

When those responsible do sit down to discuss concrete plans, they must be reminded that there is no scientific-technological ‘quick fix’ here. Warnings are mediated through many institutional and social levels, all of which must be fully engaged in any system. Systems only work insofar as those at risk understand and trust the warnings, and are able to respond to them; without the full participation of vulnerable communities in their design and management, this is unlikely to happen.

John Twigg is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University of London.

Good Practice Review 9, ‘Disaster Risk Reduction: Mitigation and Preparedness in Development and Emergency Programming’, is available here. Follow the link at the bottom of the article to download the full text of the Review (you must register as an HPN member first).

Readers may also find relevant the recent HPN Network Paper 'Disaster Preparedness Programmes in India: A Cost Benefit Analysis' Click here to download the paper.

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