UN wants 10 percent of Disaster Relief for Prevention by Tim Large AlertNet 9:40am 21st Jan, 2005   19 Jan 2005    Jan Egeland, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, spoke with AlertNet on the opening day of the World Disasters Conference in Kobe, Japan.    The Asian tsunami crisis has put disaster prevention on the front page. Will the interest remain when the headlines have moved onto something else?    We have a momentum now. We have a momentum of understanding, and we have to use that as much as we can to get institutions going and get funds, not only for relief but also for early warning, for prevention and development. And finally, to have at this world conference a new understanding of what can really be done. It is achievable actually to halve the number of deaths in the next decade of natural disasters. Now 250 million people have their lives devastated every year by natural disasters.    You’ve told the Kobe conference that you want 10 percent of global emergency relief to be earmarked for preventing future disasters. Is this feasible?    I think that is feasible. Some donors have already devoted 10 percent of their emergency relief to prevent future disasters, and some of the disaster-prone countries are also using 10 percent of their disaster intervention for prevention. Probably it should be even higher because we know that $1 spent on prevention pays back 10-fold in less need for disaster intervention later.    How will you keep governments to this?    I think it can be part of the outcome document of this World Conference on Disaster Prevention. Hopefully we can get one after the other of the donors to put it into their national policies. We’ll certainly advocate for that. And hopefully we can get good governance in as many countries as possible that are disaster-prone, in the South as well as in the North, to say enough is enough, we now will have to prepare better.    After the 2003 Bam earthquake, a lot of donor pledges never actually came through. How can we be sure countries honour their promises for tsunami relief?    Already we are seeing better donor behaviour. There is more good humanitarian donorship now than ever before. We have received in cash already more money to the aid organisations three weeks after the tsunami than we got for the whole investment in helping the Bam earthquake victims. Japan is actually transferring half of its $500 million immediately to the aid organisations, and most of that is being received as we speak.    But there are billions more promised that we need the donors to honour. We (the aid organisations) have not forgotten. And those who in particular have not forgotten are the affected communities, and they and we will remind the donors to pay up, because it is the least you can do when you promise.    A hot topic after the tsunami is the need for early warning systems. But is it enough simply to put the infrastructure in place?    We have to have a new generation of awareness. We need to have not only the surveillance, which is now happening. We have surveillance for earthquakes and tsunamis and drought and hurricanes and locusts already. What is needed is a better way of communicating accurate information to the people in need of such information.    Secondly, we also have to have early investment in prevention. We last year had a terrible problem because the (U.N.) Food and Agricultural Organisation told the world that there would be a locust plague of biblical proportions in northern Africa. Nobody woke up to the early warning, and we did have the full plague, and when it was too late we got the money to fight the locusts.    One of the hopes for the next 10 years is that every child will be taught through school and through family about the natural hazards that surround them and how to prevent the casualties.    The draft outcome document of this conference looks pretty short on concrete targets. Isn’t there a real danger that Kobe will produce a lot of platitudes and worthy talk without much action at the end?    There is a big danger of that, because we have seen too many world conferences in the past and too many intergovernmental meetings where the delegates promise a lot of things and agree a lot of things but nothing happens on the ground. What we have to do is keep decision makers, keep the agencies, including the U.N., accountable to follow up.    In my view, however, the document is good. It would mean that each child should know what to do, be taught what to do. Each country should have a natural disasters prevention strategy. Each school and hospital should be resilient instead of being a death trap when disasters strike. And we should have enough resources from rich countries, and within the national budgets, to invest in disaster reduction. It’s all achievable.    Some disaster experts say the trick is to map disaster prevention targets onto the Millennium Development Goals, the only globally agreed plan to reduce poverty.    We can and we should indeed because the Millennium Development Goals, which are very simple -– no child should starve, no child should not have schooling, no child should not have healthcare, no child should face a continuous spread of AIDS etc. Those goals are threatened by natural disasters, which are on the rise in so many parts of the world.    We have to match the investment in meeting the Millennium Development Goals with the very concrete goals of reducing natural disasters in all of the disaster-prone countries. And remember, half of the world’s population – around three billion people – live in disaster-prone areas.    Urbanisation worldwide has created sprawling megacities, in which millions are at risk of natural hazards. How do megacities fit into the disaster prevention equation?    Perhaps the most frightening perspective is to have a truly megadisaster in a megacity,because then we would have not only a casualty rate like we’re seeing now with the tsunami at the end of last year. We could see a hundred times that in the worst case. Some of the megacities are earthquake-prone. Others are prone for flooding, etc.    We have to have city planning. We have to have development. We have to have investment in the poor areas, because the poor people now are the most vulnerable. It calls for good governance in countries, and it calls for good investment by those who can afford it. And time is running short for some of those megacities in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America.    Which cities in particular are at risk?    I would say that a number of cities in the largest countries of Asia, some of the largest countries in Latin America, and some of the largest cities in Africa are all very disaster-prone. An earthquake could really mean that we could have enormous casualty rates. There’s still time to prevent that, and we hope that more attention could be given to the megacities, and not only to the countryside, which we normally associate with tsunamis and flooding and drought.
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