Disaster Reduction: Changes since the Kobe conference and the tsunami

During the opening of the World Disaster Reduction Conference this year in Kobe,Japan, UN Under-Secretary General Jan Egeland quoted a Japanese proverb: “Vision without action is a daydream: Action without vision is a nightmare.”

His statement was a wake-up call to the attendees, whose mission was to agree upon a framework for reducing the frequency and impact of disaster worldwide. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 was a powerful indication that natural disasters are having a far higher impact on human life today than ever before.

The earthquake and subsequent lethal waves struck only two weeks before the conference, and helped galvanise international attention on risk reduction, a topic that had languished low on the global agenda for years. Many attending the conference - held every decade-hoped that disaster-risk reduction finally would receive the sort of attention that invigorated other global campaigns, such as the eradication of landmines and the battle against HIV/AIDS.

Three months after the conference, however, experts claim that while Kobe represented a shift in the right direction, the questions now are whether the political momentum can be sustained, and whether stakeholders - especially major development actors such as the World Bank and other international financial institutions - would heed the call to action. Egeland, in reference to those killed by natural disasters, closed his introduction by saying, “The best way to honour the dead is to protect the living. Good intentions must be turned into concrete action.”

Kobe: One step forward?

Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University in the US, said that the Kobe conference was far more ‘’considered’’ than the Yokohama conference 10 years earlier.

“Yokohama was thrown together and was really a wish-list and largely irrelevant to governments attending. The Kobe agreement was more considered. It hangs together and is relevant, although the language is more careful than one would like,” he said, while explaining the content of the conference’s outcome document.

Walker - a veteran of the politics and implementation of disaster reduction - felt there still were major shortcomings in the final document. The most glaring relates to climate change, which was only included in the Kobe agreement after intensive lobbying against the US stand.

Climate change is seen as a key issue by most scientists and observers who research and design mitigation programmes for natural disasters.

Some participants at the conference also expressed disappointment that little mention had been made of the Millennium Development Goals or of bad development practices as a contributor to disasters. “The ability to reach out to civil society and the business community was also a missed opportunity,” said Walker, who maintained that the framework had been “couched as a state-driven process.”

Amid the government delegations and donors at the week-long conference, there were also numerous civil-society representatives and delegates from international NGOs, who stressed the importance of community awareness and community involvement in mitigation initiatives.

Various presenters emphasised that global or regional strategies that involve high-tech communication and scientific modelling are in the end not as effective as lifesaving mitigation that builds local capacity and knowledge. Many analysts agreed that the major weakness of the outcome of the Kobe conference relates to the lack of clearly defined goals for the next 10 years. “The [final] report alludes to the possibility of targets, but does not set them,” said Walker.

Fenella Frost, disaster-reduction adviser for the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), agreed that specific targets would have been better, but she also told IRIN that the outcome document from Kobe did offer a useful benchmark. “It was a good initial step in putting down five areas that member states should focus on and take forward,” she said.

While the language was vague, the outcome document has called for progress in sharing expertise, raising awareness of disaster reduction globally and following up on agreements arising from the Yokohama and Johannesburg conferences. Despite the weaknesses, Walker considered that when put into a historical context the Kobe conference was nonetheless a “great step forward”.

Tsunami effect – A double-edged sword?

The challenge now facing risk-reduction activists is how to manage the heightened political interest generated by the tsunami disaster. David Peppiatt, head of the Provention Consortium, told IRIN that the political interest in risk reduction was welcome, but there was a risk that the policies would be misguided and skewed by the December 2004 tsunami.

Peppiatt told IRIN that the tsunami was a rare event, and that international policy and dialogue should not be shaped and driven by one event.

“One issue that has been tsunami-driven is the focus on high-impact, low-frequency events, when in fact the high-frequency, low-impact events cause as much, if not more, damage over the long term,” he said, citing concern over a number of initiatives proposed since Kobe that focus uniquely on early warning and natural hazards. “But equally - we don’t want to lose that attention,” he added.

Former US President Bill Clinton’s offer to spend one-third of his time on tsunami disaster response was a “great opportunity” for keeping risk reduction on the agenda, Peppiatt said. Real progress would depend on whether this new-found attention would lead to the desired changes.

“We need to stay on track and galvanise the massive investments made in the West for the benefit of developing countries,” he said. Peppiatt, as the manager of the Provention Consortium secretariat - a global coalition of governments, international organisations, academic institutions, the private sector and civil society aiming to reduce the impact of disaster on developing countries - was concerned that the development perspective had been lost at Kobe. Representation was mainly from the disaster-preparedness and emergency-response communities, but development actors, such as the World Bank, “held the key to making significant inroads into the disaster-risk reduction agenda.”

Development actors hold the key…

The final outcome document agreed upon at Kobe – the “Hyogo Framework for Action for 2005-2015” – aims for a “substantial reduction of disaster losses, in lives and in assets of communities and countries” in the next decade. There are three strategic goals to achieve this, of which the first two - integrating disaster-risk reduction into development policies and building institutional capacity - primarily concern development actors.

Unfortunately, disaster-risk reduction has never been seen as a development priority, said Peppiatt, who maintained that great progress could be made if development actors integrated risk reduction in their work as a non-negotiable element.

Many presenters and participants at the Kobe conference spoke of disaster reduction as an isolated pillar of theory and intervention that did not neatly fall into conventional categories of intervention such as emergency, humanitarian or development. Numerous speakers and agency chiefs spoke of the need for disaster reduction to be built into development strategies and be fully recognized as part of any serious investment or financing of development.

Compelling arguments of compassion but also economy were offered when the cost of reconstruction may be between 10 or 100 times the value of what was destroyed by a natural disaster. “A lot of current development configures or prefigures risk, contributing to greater vulnerability. The solution is to introduce risk-reduction approaches into policy that avoid development practice contributing to making communities even more vulnerable. This was not addressed at Kobe.

“Humanitarians are not the only community whose approach we need to change,” Peppiatt told IRIN. He was referring to the need for international financing institutions, governments and major donors to understand the importance of incorporating disaster reduction into every stage of development.

Where’s the leadership?

Another challenge was the lack of recognized leadership in the field. Analysts agreed that left to their own devices, governments were unlikely to promote and implement risk-reduction agendas in developing countries.

“The fact is that alongside military spending, taxation, health and other services, disaster reduction is not a big issue,” said Walker, who did not expect individual member states to take the lead. Nor was it clear that the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) could pave the way.

Walker explained the limitations faced by the inter-agency secretariat under the authority of the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. “There’s a lot of discussion on the future of ISDR. In my view, the ISDR needs to remember that it’s a secretariat. It should be there to empower states to make progress and prick their conscience when they go off track. Basically, it needs to understand that its role is to encourage those countries to progress the Hyogo agreement,” Walker told IRIN.

There were areas where an immediate difference could be made. The ISDR could set out a template of targets by which state actors could be held accountable, said Walker. This would provide a basis for discussion. From a donor perspective, Frost agreed that “without an agency being proactive and keeping tabs on member states, the issue was liable to fall by the wayside.”

Despite the ISDR budget for early-warning activities having doubled since Kobe, many donors were not putting resources into disaster-reduction “architecture”, she said. In the absence of this “political buy-in”, it was difficult to see where innovation and leadership would emerge.

“Civil society doesn’t have the clout or the single voice to move this on a global level. Elements of civil society are very active, but we’re not going to get the sort of momentum that is needed to press this issue ahead,” said Peppiatt.

The manager of Provention Consortium did not see the ISDR as a catalyst. “There is a lot happening outside of the ISDR process. The UN is a key actor, but not the only actor. That reality needs to be recognized within the UN system. There is a huge amount of activity happening outside of the inter-state process,” he explained to IRIN.

Where to now?

Peppiatt considered that progress over the next 10 years would depend on how effectively the benefits of disaster mitigation were conveyed to stakeholders, especially development actors. These were long-term efforts, such as building technical expertise and introducing working policies and capacity in developing countries to incorporate risk reduction.

“It doesn’t happen overnight. We need to convince the developing countries to focus on things that do not produce overnight benefits. This is always hard as it doesn’t produce immediate results,” he said.

Peppiatt was encouraged by evidence that development banks were taking risk reduction more seriously. A newly released World Bank report on global hotspots, which apparently reflects the views of senior World Bank officials in Washington, called for risk reduction to be built into programme planning.

At the conference, a recorded message from the then-president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, told participants that the institution was totally committed to avoidance of damage and preservation of life, emphasizing that “we are sure in the World Bank that work on prevention is of critical importance.”

This is a view that was echoed throughout the Kobe conference. But it takes a while for ideas to become mainstream, and frontline agencies must wait until the day that governmental stakeholders and donors decide that disaster-risk reduction is indispensable to mainstream development.

The Kobe conference put the arguments forward and brought that day much closer.

“Good development should be about reduced risk. If it’s increasing risk, then there is something fundamentally wrong – yet this is what has often happened to date. Policies are taking shape, but the challenge is to turn this into action. But at least we’re talking the right language,” said Peppiatt.