Towards a post-2015 framework for Disaster Risk Reduction BUILDING THE RESILIENCE OF NATIONS AND COMMUNITIES TO DISASTERS

Dear All, I am enjoying your contributions to this important topic.
In Auckland in New Zealand we have a solid commitment from our council, government and the community to progress a number of initiatives in this area.
Politically we see investment in this area helps position our city as as great place to live work and invest, because although we face hazards, we have programmes in place to help us recover more quickly. Government also sees the importance of this owing to the significant impact that our city has on the economy of our country.
We work at the local community level by working with local communities to help them prepare simple plans that identify their hazards, their commuication systems, their local governance contacts, and their resourses. We encourage local politicians to work with the local leadership on this planning. We also recruit and train community volunteers.
We compliment this at the city level with close working relationships with all our agencies, who would be involved in a disaster, with three month exercises to keep us all current.

Dear Colleagues:

I would like to do my comments following those ones made on this dialogue by Hare Krishna Nibanupudi (we met in Davos last August; Hi my friend!), which I fully agree. As a very general trend, politicians (either local, regional or national level) will not become committed with long term vision (which is essential) prioritizing DRR strategies and investments in prevention, unless high pressures will be made over them. Where can such pressures come from, apart from suffering hard disasters (not an option)?

- 1) From voters. I think UN should also focus efforts on directly arriving to citizens, and inform them about the same issues that is doing with government leaders, creating awareness and encouraging them to demand the political leaders to change the attitudes, principles and paradigms which are being demonstrating that don’t work to increase sustainability.
Of course increasing efforts in education at schools and universities is a good strategy, but requires a very long term to become effective. It could be helped by parallel ways, with a shorter term approach. I would do it using the mass media. Their strong power to change tendencies should be considered. I know that it’s not the usual way to do things in UN strategies, and know about the inherent difficulties to go ahead with such a way. But let’s be honest first of all: Do we recognize the problem (short term vision and absence of enough commitment of politicians)? If yes, could it be a very efficient way to use the media to quickly create awareness, educate citizens on the basic principles and encourage them (all of it at least creating enough critical mass) to press politicians on the right way? If yes, it is a solution to solve the problem. The existing barriers to do it, is willing to be discussed if the cost/benefit relationship makes it worth or not.

- 2) From professional groups of experts and other technical associations. It includes universities, excellence centers and any king of technological institutes, think tanks, etc. Here there is a very big critical mass, plenty of committed people, with enough awareness, and highly motivated to do things on the right way. But on the other hand, they also feel highly frustrated because they aren’t able to find ways to convince politicians to take the right decisions for sustainability. I’m quite sure that if UN go ahead, strongly leading and supporting these groups, as well as coordinating them, big steps could be done.

- 3) And the other big Agent to take in account is Private Sector. Lobbies and bigger companies in a general sense have also the capacity to influence politicians. Corporate Social Responsibility, commitment with sustainability, win-win strategies, the need of changes in essential paradigms in economy, and many other tendencies are fortunately increasing, but it is need some kind of strong pushing of them; and on the other hand it has to be done in a honest and coherent way with the inherent messages, not like in many (probably most?) cases like a marketing tool. Again, probably UN can look for ways to help, lead, guide and coordinate efforts on this way, in order that such tendencies will be strongly strengthen.

It’s a fact that UN is over governments; citizens, professional groups and private sector are below governments. Real pressures (smartly guided and strongly helped and supported by UN) from both sides… would not be effective on Governments?

In a different approach, not to pressure, but to use data and peer reports to educate, convince and demonstrate that it worth to prioritize prevention actions and sustainability strategies in a general sense, I would suggest to elaborate and disseminate a summary of the different existing studies providing feasible data on this regard. There are different ones, probably even many, but they are too dispersed and finally missing “somewhere” inside the vast amount of data, reports, pilot projects, etc. If the clear conclusions emanating from such studies are clearly extracted, summarized and shown, in a simple and understandable way (also for a critical mass of citizens and other Agents), there will not be remaining more excuses for not taken immediate actions. And this statement should be disseminated together with the message addressed to politicians (from the different Agents, together with UN) strongly encouraging them to take decisions based on such demonstrated evidences.
Kind regards.

Luis Miguel Laguna
Mining Engineer – Consultant
Advocate of the MCR Campaign

Some succesful examples for enhancing community resilience (against
flooding) were performed in the framework of the second CRUE funding initiative "Flood resilient communities - managing the consequences of flooding". Key results can be found in the synthesis report, which is available at: http://www.crue-eranet.net/.
More detailed, but concise information is presented in papers of a Special Issue in the journal "Natural Hazards and Earth System
Sciences":http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/special_issue157.html

Especially the papers by Fleischhauser et al. (on stakeholder
involvement) and Evers et al. (on collaborative modelling) might give useful information for the HFA process.

Dear Friends,

Just a quick note, we've decided to leave the dialogue open until Monday, 8 April 2013, as we learned more people would still like to contribute to it. Thank you.

Warm regards,
Bernadia

In reading the summary of Facilitator of March 28, I thought that the excellent summary would be further improved by referring to the two key recommendations of Global Platform sessions and HFA Mid-term review : ”Cost-benefit analysis” and “Targeting”.

1) How do we motivate local government leaders to invest in DRR and resilience?

Lack of the motivation is largely due to the lack of recognition of importance/effectiveness of DRR. Many urgent issues other than DRR is another reason. Therefore the answer to the question is to show the effectiveness of DRR to government leaders in terms of contribution to socio-economic development, poverty reduction etc., so that due investment/budget allocation may be made for DRR in the comparison/competition among various development agenda. To do so, methodology for cost-benefit analysis of DRR should be developed as the first step (Ref. 8.3 of the 3rd Global Platform and p.45-46 of HFA Mid-term Review).
It should be noted that even though local government leaders recognize the importance of DRR, they feel difficulty in actual investment unless provided with detailed implementation plan. Targeting is necessary to address this issue (how much is required annually and until when etc.). Such quantitative targeting is necessary also for monitoring the progress. Knowing progress is an essential factor for motivation for investment/budget allocation. (Ref. 14-16 of Chair’s Summary of the 2nd Global Platform Session)

2)How do we encourage national actions to improve DRR implementation at local level?

DRR is best implemented through integration of self help, mutual help and public help. This is well recognized by donors and emphasis of assistance is sifting from national to local level. I am certain that such shift of donors will lead to encouragement of national governments to improve DRR at local level.

3)How do we enhance collaboration between citizen groups and local governments for effective risk reduction

I will just refer to an example of JICA project. Atlas Region of Morocco is a tourism spot. In 1995 floods killed many people including tourists causing serious damage to the local economy. Flood early warning system was established through involvement of local people, private sectors and the local government especially with the strong commitment of the governor to establish the system to secure the safety of tourists as well as the local people, and to maintain active tourism business. Before, a campaign board for DRR was taken away by local people because it would imply “danger”, but nowadays the early warning system and other DRR measures are considered essential for the society. Evacuation drill is conducted with participation even from neighboring communities. Regular meeting is being held between local people and the local government. Government considers to use a part of the profit from the tourism business for the maintenance of the early warning system.

Let me thank Benardia for bringing this out ahead of the post-2015 Disaster Risk Reduction. It is particularly to important consider urban DRR in view of rising urban disasters. There have been a lot of efforts in ensuring reducing disaster risk in rural areas but of late, disasters have shown a shift and hit urbans unawares. It is in this view very important to:
• Motivate local government leaders to invest in DRR and resilience
• Encourage national actions to improve DRR implementation at local levels
• Enhance collaboration between citizen groups and local government t for effective risk reduction

Allow my contribution in view of the background. Firstly, let me put in simple terms what it theoretically means to reduce disaster risks. It is about building capacities to respond to a situation when a hazard of any kind meets a vulnerability of any kind. Disaster is directly proportional to hazards and vulnerabilities and inversely related to capacities. Urban disasters can therefore be reduced by reducing or eliminating hazards or vulnerabilities or by increasing capacities of urban areas and local governments in this case.

In order to 'motivate local government leaders to invest in DRR and resilience', in-depth awareness of rising disasters and their underlying causes like climate change has to be done to local government leaders. This will enable them appreciate the need of employing Disaster Risk Management (DRM) approach to planning and implementation of all development work. This has to be coupled with capacity building to conduct assessments of disaster risks. This will equip them identify the existing hazards in their jurisdiction, their underlying cause and plan accordingly, that is coming up with well mapped detailed disaster plans.

With the knowledge gained from sensitization and capacity building, local governments will see the importance of investing in DRR since its importance will be so clear. The need to align all other development works will therefore be easy. Consequently, this will ‘encourage actions to improve DRR implementations at both local levels, where details of assessments take place, and national levels, as aggregates of local levels’.

In some countries, at least I know of Malawi, local governments already have decentralisation structures which facilitate community situation analysis as a process to developing development plans to be funded through the local governments. Such decentralisation structures (Areas Development Committees as they are called in Malawi) need to be equipped to employ Participatory Assessment of Disaster Risks (PADR) as a tool when developing community development plans. This will enable them to go beyond needs assessment and identify even the hazards and their vulnerability against which they could propose appropriate actions hence in the end reducing the risks of possible disasters. I have a case where Christian Aid and its partners in Malawi built the capacities of community decentralisation structures in DRR issues, especially to conduct PADR for their communities. They were able to identify critical hazards and what needed to be done to reduce risks of disasters. Incorporating advocacy issues, the structures forced the local government leadership (District Assembly) to incorporate their plans into District Development Plan and some considerable activities there in secured funding. Not without mentioning that more has to be done, but this has been a very good start to ensure funding for DRR issues. Consolidating such plans, the local governments would make up national plans that are responsive to DRR. National budgets will hence follow suit.

Evaluation of such plans over years and what challenges come along will give a need to review different policies and laws to be in agreement to situations demanded by the plans hence ensure harmonisation and collaboration among not only citizen groups and local government but also any other development agencies.

TCHAKA KAMANGA
PROGRAM OFFICER (DRR & Climate Change)-CHRISTIAN AID, MALAWI