British Red Cross: Prepare for increasing disasters

Around 9,000 people in 15 vulnerable Nepalese communities covered by the Red Cross programme are seeing these benefits in several ways.

The programme reduces the impact of natural hazards such as flash floods and landslides, through measures such as the construction of flood containing walls, planting trees along riverbanks, maintenance of wells to protect water sources and construction of evacuation shelters.

Saving money
By reducing the likelihood of disasters damaging land or crops, the communities save the money they would have needed to spend on repairing any damage – they also gain the revenue from their fields remaining productive.

This makes a particularly big difference with initiatives such as building dams designed to protect against seasonal flooding. Previously floods would have made pieces of land unusable for periods of time every year – now they can be used all year round to grow crops.

Between the money saved on recovery and additional revenue gained from people being able to carry on with their livelihoods uninterrupted, the economic benefit greatly outweighs the investment made in the programme by the Red Cross.

Community resilience
Emma Giddings, British Red Cross Eurasia programme support manager, said: “We’ve been supporting the programme in southeast Nepal since 2001. Not only does preparing for disasters save lives and livelihoods, it also makes economic sense. In the long-term it is cheaper to reduce the risk of disaster than to respond to an emergency after it’s happened.”

As well as tangible measures like building dams, the programme also involved building community knowledge on how to prepare for, deal with and recover from disasters. This includes how
to write plans to prepare for disasters, first aid training and providing rickshaw ambulances to speed up the movement of the sick and injured to local health centres.

Climate change
The success of the programme in Nepal demonstrates a strong economic justification for continuing and replicating the programme with more communities in places like Nepal and Bangladesh, where climate change is impacting the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.

This year has already seen hundreds of natural catastrophes, including the earthquake in China, cyclone in Myanmar, floods in India and hurricanes in the Caribbean. By the end of the year the number of victims is likely to be one of the highest on record.

Clare Sayce, British Red Cross climate change officer, said: “Climate change is a humanitarian issue as much as it is an environmental, political and economic one. It is going to mean more floods and droughts with more issues in getting food and clean water and further risk of disease. In recent years an increasing number of weather disasters, thought to be related to climate change, have hit the most vulnerable hardest – the young, elderly, sick and poor – always in the poorest countries.”