As the number of disasters mounts, is it inevitable that they leave behind a trail of helpless victims dependent on the generosity of a benevolent state or aid agency? Can disaster management be better integrated with development? Perhaps local governments, donors and aid agencies need to realise the importance of a community-based approach to disaster management.

A report from Christian Aid draws on the lessons learned from India’s two most recent major disasters – the Orissa super cyclone and the Gujarat earthquake. Case studies, based on the testimony of local agencies in the world’s most disaster-prone region, prove that community-based disaster prevention and response management can reduce deaths and limit the damage to livelihoods.

In the next 20 years, the global cost of climate-related disasters could be 10 times the value of aid flows. Two-thirds of India is struck regularly by disasters: each year, around 25 million Indians are killed, injured or have their lives blighted by them. Windspeeds of 300 km/hr brought misfortune for 12.7 million people on Orissa’s coast. India’s most devastating earthquake for half a century affected 15 million Gujaratis.

Christian Aid argues that the reason why death tolls and damage are unnecessarily high is due to top-down disaster mitigation and preparedness (DMP) and a directive approach to development planning. Policy-makers learn little from previous disasters. Inefficiency and indifference to risk is found across the political and bureaucratic elite. Disaster response and rehabilitation programmes are externally driven and often riddled with corruption.

There is a community-based DMP alternative:

• While over 10 000 people died in Andhra Pradesh in a 1977 cyclone, less than 1 000 died in a more severe cyclone in 1990, thanks to preparation, early warning systems and shelters.
• An Orissa village where a Christian Aid partner NGO had been working saw no loss of life from the super cyclone and was back on its feet within a week, while a neighbouring village was still floundering to rebuild shelters nine months later.
• Disasters can be social liberators, empowering women to start participating in community decision-making and to develop numeracy and literacy skills.

Lives can be saved by simple means such as constructing cyclone shelters, enforcing building codes, providing local officials with satellite phones, sharing ideas with local people about how to respond and timely broadcasting of warnings. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, sophisticated communications systems may be important, but it is the ‘software’ – awareness, community preparedness and clear, locally-run management systems – that is essential.

Among the many recommendations to strengthen local coping capacities and to ensure that people forced by poverty to live in the path of disaster have a clear and loud voice are:

• getting away from the mindset that there is anything ‘natural’ about disasters
• giving local councils more power to handle the response to an emergency – and not just hang around waiting for national or international relief agencies to move in
• training local masons in techniques to build safe and strong, but cheap, housing
• improving search and rescue missions for when disaster does strike
• re-thinking land use in coastal areas
• improving early warning systems, training locals in emergency drills and using a community-based DMP checklist to ensure and monitor broad participation.

Source(s):
‘Facing up to the storm: how local communities can cope with disaster’, Christian Aid, by Tom Palakudiyil and Mary Todd, July 2003 Full document.

Funded by: Christian Aid

id21 Research Highlight: 10 October 2003

Further Information:
Christian Aid
PO Box 100
London SE1 7RT
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7620 4444
Fax: +44 (0)20 7620 0719
Contact the contributor: info@christian-aid.org

Contact the contributor: mary.todd@virgin.net

Tom Palakudiyil
Christian Aid India
A 15/18 Vasant Vihar
PO Box 100
London SE1 7RT

Tel: +44 (0)20 7523 2350
Contact the contributor: tpalakudiyil@christian-aid.org

Christian Aid

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See the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society

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