April 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Disasters: What the United Nations and its World Can Do

Ben Wisner is a researcher in the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College, vice­chair of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative and the International Geographical Union's Commission on Hazards and Risks. He is author of At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters (London: Routledge, 1994) and also serves as an advisor to the AFSC emergency response program.

Ironically, it was during a decade dedicated to reducing loss from natural disaster (1990-99) that we have seen some of the worst losses of human life, and largest economic losses, in living memory. Hurricanes and cyclones took large tolls in South Asia, Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and the US. There was unprecedented flooding in Europe, China, and Venezuela, the USA. Earthquakes in Turkey, Japan, and Taiwan claimed a surprising number of lives, and, together with the Northridge in Los Angeles, cost billions.

The combined cost of disasters worldwide, according to the Center for Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium, was US $741 billion between 1990-99. Human lives lost were 589,000, and the number of deaths has climbed each year since 1994. These are officially reported deaths; the actual number could be higher.

Now, just as that decade of intensive scientific activity and public discussion of disasters has come to an end, we witness the same old story: an earthquake in Central America, the 18th damaging one since 1990. More than 700 are dead, 2,000 missing, thousands of homes demolished, two-fifths of hospital capacity destroyed, one-fifth of school buildings rendered unusable.

In India, the same scenario was repeated on an even greater scale in the state of Gujarat. An area the size of Wales or West Virginia has been reduced to rubble as if it had been bombed.

These terrible losses were not necessary

Earthquakes happen. But disaster follows because of human action and inaction. In the neighborhood of Las Colinas in Santa Tecla, just outside San Salvador, 400 homes were lost beneath a wall of debris from a collapsing slope above. This was no "act of God." Road building, deforestation, and property development on the slope almost certainly contributed to its instability. In fact, a group of Las Colinas residents and environmental groups were in court only last year to stop development on that slope and the ridge above. The judge ruled against them. Experts agree that steep slopes made of volcanic soil are unstable. Geologists know this. Planners know this.

Earthquake damage, El Salvador. Photo: Mario Davila

It is no "act of God" that no more than 10% of multi-story structures in Indian cities are built earthquake-resistant. The buildings go up rapidly with little planning or inspection in Gujarat's boom economy. A study commissioned by the Indian government warned in 1998 about lack of compliance with building codes throughout India, especially in zones, such as Gujarat, where seismic risk is high. In El Salvador and also in Gujarat, rural people have been migrating in search of work to cities like San Salvador, Ahmedabad, and Bhuj. They become squatters in makeshift dwellings, in some of the most potentially dangerous areas in an earthquake. They have little or nothing to invest in making their homes safer, and little incentive because they don't own the land where they've built.

In San Salvador and Ahmedabad alike, the middle class is attracted to the rapidly growing edge of the sprawling cities. Developers and contractors rush to fill this market demand, often in too much haste to observe building codes. This is where the landslide buried hundreds in Las Colinas, and where new apartment houses for Ahmedabad's salaried workers came crashing down.

In both recent earthquakes hospitals either collapsed, killing patients and staff, as in the city of Bhuj in Gujarat, or became useless because of damage. The main medical laboratory in El Salvador's capital cannot function because bottles holding chemicals were not secured on shelves with simple restraints. Forty per cent of El Salvador's health care facilities suffered disabling damage. Yet is it well known how to protect health care structures and their non-structural elements.

What the United Nations Family has Done

Many agencies within the UN family joined with other international scientific and humanitarian organizations, national committees, non-governmental organizations, and citizen groups in an effort called the IDNDR, or International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-99). This period saw accelerated and intensive international exchange of scientific information. More than enough knowledge was collected to have prevented the loss of life in the landslide in Las Colinas. That knowledge could have dramatically reduced the number of lives claimed in Gujarat, and certainly could have protected priority infrastructure such as schools and hospitals.

Going into the IDNDR, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), had already begun to accumulate a vast amount of detailed advice about protecting hospitals. Three large volumes of guidelines are available gratis from PAHO. Why wasn't this knowledge put to use in El Salvador, and applied to the major civilian hospital in Bhuj?

In its last three years the IDNDR developed a comprehensive project for urban earthquake risk reduction called RADIUS. Nine pilot cities took part, with another 84 associate cities. Where it worked best, as in Tijuana, Mexico and Izmir, Turkey, there was strong support from the local administration and many local universities and professional groups.

El Salvador, landslide after earthquake. Photo: United States Geological Survey

The project developed a low-cost method of anticipating urban earthquake damage and a model for creating an action plan to mitigate this impact. Tijuana is about the same size as San Salvador. The language is the same. Why were methods developed by RADIUS in Tijuana not applied in San Salvador? In part the answer is that a terrible civil war raged in El Salvador until 1992. Since the end of that war UN agencies have been very much involved with the post war recovery process and the building up of the civilian institutions necessary for peace and good governance. These are the same institutions needed to apply existing knowledge to reducing the impacts of earthquakes and other extreme events such as hurricane Mitch (1998).

After Mitch, El Salvador was in an ideal position to make a quantum leap in preparedness for not only the next hurricane, but the next earthquake, volcanic eruption, or season of extreme El Nino weather. El Salvador had not suffered the extreme devastation of Honduras and Nicaragua, yet it was an integral part of new donor attention in Central America to making mitigation of risk a mainstream part of planning. Good urban planning, good land use and environmental management were encouraged by institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Stockholm group of donors.

If knowledge, institutions, and finance were available, what has been missing in El Salvador, in India, and elsewhere in the world where disasters continue to plague humanity?

What More Could the UN Family Do?

UN agencies have provided three things so far: technical knowledge, support for institution building, and financial assistance. The missing ingredient is the kind of moral imperative that can mobilize local political will. It is when the world agrees to standards of responsibility by nation states toward their citizens in the form of treaties, covenants and other agreements, that this moral force is felt most strongly.

From an on-going conversation on the internet about reconstruction following disasters Two examples from Nepal, albeit not on earthquakes: 1) In the 1980s, there were devastating landslides in western Nepal. The then government announced a relocation program that meant allocation of government-owned land in the flat plains of Terai (Southern Nepal, fertile grounds) to the landslide victims. During my subsequent landslide inventory survey, I found that none of the victims got any piece of land, but the influential rich people managed to add government-allotted lands to what they already had in the Terai. The poor without the voice continued living in whatever they had--meaning the same land with high susceptibility to landslides. They continued braving the landslide threat, and suffering from it. (I witnessed how a person dug up the skeleton of his father after 20 years, when the landslide destroyed his house, and he was excavating the site for reconstruction of his house). 2) Following the 1993 flood in south-central Nepal, a new village was created with assistance from a foreign donor. People occupied the newly-built houses only for stocking their fodder--they continued living in their houses that they built up exactly at the original place. Seeking the opinion of the victims, and planning as per their wish with their full involvement, and making them understand what we think (new technology, awareness raising) is perhaps the key point. With their involvement, all issues such as being "near to an active fault," "narrow street vs. wide street," "preservation of cultural heritage," etc. will find the right solution. Give them full opportunity for involvement, educate and involve, and listen to what they say. They will never talk nonsense if given the right environment. People in India inherit 6000 years of cumulative wisdom, including the ways to survive earthquakes and rebuilding. --Amod Mani Dixit, National Society for Earthquake Technology, Nepal

Why not set our sights on an international treaty committing governments around the world to apply low-cost solutions based on available knowledge to prevent such tragic loss?

Networks of scientists and engineers exist that could take on the technical work of defining these standards. These networks were created in part by the IDNDR, but this International Decade left unfinished business. Science was exchanged, but generally hasn't been applied. Such an effort would require thousands of experts to work out low-cost, minimum practices to avoid further tragedies. Scientists and engineers would sit down with lawyers, legislators and policy experts to work out how the standards would be enforced.

This is not an impossible task. It has happened before. One recent example is the exchange among hundreds of agencies working in humanitarian and disaster relief that led to agreement on a detailed set of minimum technical standards for relief. Known as the SPHERE project, its published document covers food, water, shelter, health care, and many other aspects of relief.

It has also happened where global warming is concerned. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has mobilized thousands of scientists whose work has gone into the treaty-making process that led to the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse emissions. Could the UN not create a parallel Inter-governmental Panel on Natural Disaster, to mobilize existing knowledge and feed it into a treaty-making process? Such a body is necessary because so many different kinds of knowledge and expertise are needed. No single existing agency of the UN covers all the specialist knowledge required.

What is to be done during the many years such a treaty is in the making? The beauty of this process is that the low-cost solutions will filter out into society. Citizen groups will demand action by their governments, as they did in Turkey when it became clear that contractors hadn't followed building codes, or in South Florida in the USA, when it came to light that poor construction methods were responsible for much avoidable damage in hurricane Andrew.

Absolute safety is not a human right. Safety from avoidable loss, injury and death is. Nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes much sense if the human beings who are supposed to enjoy these rights can be snuffed out because a government neglected to enforce its own building codes.

To send reconstruction and relief assistance: earmark checks to AFSC/EARTHQUAKE, and mail to AFSC 2161 Mass. Ave. Cambridge, MA 02140.

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