admin January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
admin August 2nd, 2011
Sadly for the people suffering in the Horn of Africa, the famine there is destined to become a case history of international inaction in advance of a known disaster, a ‘How not to do it’ of emergency preparation and response. And all of the key players – governments, aid agencies, UN organisations – are already lining up to say that it was not their fault, even before the much-needed aid has really begun to arrive.
The first jolt to the emergency relief system was delivered by the Tsunami at Xmas 2004 when the existing systems were found wanting. In particular, too many organisations turned up to help with little or no coordination. Chaos ensued.
Some progress had been made on this front by the time the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, but there was still a fair amount of chaos.
admin January 11th, 2011
‘Haiti and Truth about NGOs’ was an extraordinary programme on Radio 4 this morning. If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can catch it again at 2130 tonight on Radio 4 or listen to it again here.
Described as an ‘Insight into the aid industry as it faces challenging times’, reporter/presenter Edward Stourton raises a lot of the issues that will be familiar to aid industry professionals – speed of response (or lack of it) in the face of massive disaster, the relative lack of Disaster Risk Reduction, the lack of any real stockpile of emergency goods, the ability of thousands of NGOs to land on a disaster and sometimes make things worse rather than better despite the best coordination efforts of the Clusters.
admin November 12th, 2010
In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.
The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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admin June 29th, 2010
The number of natural disasters around the world fell year-on-year in 2009 according to the Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2009 produced by CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). And it also fell below the 2000-08 average.
But CRED, which is a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, warns that although the upward trend in disaster occurrence has stabilized in 2009 it is not possible to identify a trend from this fact: “In general, a high variation exists in the reported number of deaths and victims from one year to the next. This is mostly due to single disaster events that cause a tremendous human impact.” In 2009 there were no events like the 2002 drought in India (300 million victims), the 2004 Tsunami (226,408 deaths across 12 countries) or cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in 2008 causing 138,366 deaths.
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admin March 3rd, 2010
The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan. All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.
But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days. The current total, at the time of writing, is 366. For the past seven days.
admin February 15th, 2010
Everyone involved in humanitarian or development work has a pretty good idea of why disasters in general and earthquakes in particular wreak more damage in some countries than in others. Disasters hit poor countries harder because of the usual development litany: poverty; shanty towns thrown up on marginal land with little or no foundations; poor or non-existent building codes; corruption allowing developers to get round such regulations as do exist; limited state services to respond after the event.
But we are indebted to BBC News which yesterday published a fairly detailed comparison of the China (May 2008), Italy (April 2009) and Haiti (Jan 2010) quakes.
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admin January 19th, 2010
Advance Aid is indebted to work that MapAction has done for it in the course of last year. And so it is a pleasure to be able to report that MapAction has sprung into action (if you’ll forgive the pun) in Haiti.
Having accurate and up-to-date maps of disaster-hit areas is crucially important for humanitarian response teams and MapAction – itself an NGO staffed largely by volunteers – had ten deployments in 2009.
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admin January 15th, 2010
The Harvard Business Review is not normally the place one would expect to find words both of wisdom and relevance on emergency relief, but writing on the HBR’s blog, Timothy Ogden, president of Sona Partners and the editor-in-chief of Philanthropy Action, a journal for high-net-worth donors, gives good advice to corporates about how they can really help both the people of Haiti and those in the aid agencies who are working there.
His main message is to stop and think and not make a knee-jerk response. He points out that there is a discernable pattern in emergencies and that it is not a good one:
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admin January 15th, 2010
As the news this morning reports rising anger in Haiti at the ongoing failure of aid and relief supplies to arrive on the island, one thing is clear – the world was not ready.
That is not to say that we should all have foreseen a ‘once-in-200-years’ event. Or that we should have known that it was going to happen this week on Haiti. And it is not to underplay the devastation to an already weak infrastructure that has been caused by the earthquake. The level of devastation is such that it clearly makes it even harder to get such goods as are available onto the island.
But it is still true to say that we were not ready. There were not sufficient stockpiles of basic goods and medical supplies nearby, or even in the same hemisphere. None of this is the fault of the aid agencies who are, as always, achieving miracles with the resources that they have available. But the way that the emergency relief system operates works against them.
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