disaster management

Poverty-related trends in disaster response: the Global Poverty Project

I recently heard that the Global Poverty Project is looking for research assistants. The blurb on the GPP says;

“The Global Poverty Project will catalyse the international movement to end extreme poverty by creating a 90 minute feature slideshow that clearly but deeply communicates the challenges and opportunities of extreme poverty, and what can be done about it. It will be simple yet sophisticated, accessible for every person and grounded in best practice and scientific knowledge. It will tell the story of poverty, as well as the personal stories of those living in poverty. It will speak to the cynic, inspiring them at the same time. It will be shocking, compelling and demand action, while upholding the dignity and respect of those we are seeking to assist.”

The thing which really excites me about this project is its potential global impact. Anyone who has had even a cursory glance through this website will know that the main desire driving my research is the goal to do something useful, practical or relevant. I want to use my research skills to engage in current global issues, not academic games. This year, working on an emerging issue in global emergency shelter has fit the bill. Next…?

The Global Poverty Project caught my attention because I’m currently assisting the Benchmark Consulting team with a comprehensive report that they’re producing for Oxfam International: “Combined Oxfam’s Indonesia Country Analysis: An Assessment of the Changing Nature of Poverty in Indonesia over the next ten years.” It’s a fascinating report, the fruit of research and extensive series of interviews with key figures in Indonesian civil society, government and academia, to determine the current dynamics and drivers of poverty alleviation, governance and the struggle for basic rights in Indonesia beyond the statistics and the often sluggish academic literature.

One of the criteria for the research position is current knowledge of poverty-related trends in at least two of the following disciplines: international politics, development studies, economics, history, geography, anthropology, law, public health, or related social science. So just for fun, I thought I’d do a special post on poverty-related trends in disaster management. Enjoy …
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KEY POINTS

• Over 200 million people were affected by disasters every year over the past two decades, and the impact of disasters continues to increase (ISDR 2005). Highly developed countries have an average of 22.5 deaths per disaster, compared to 1052 deaths per disaster for least developed countries (IFRC World Disasters Report 2001).
• Disasters affect the poor the most. They have a lower capacity to recover, they may be living in marginal or high-risk land, or in informal settlements, they may be politically marginalised and sidelined by government relief efforts. Disasters can have a much more long-term impact on the poor, with follow-on effects on health, families’ ability to send children to school, etc.
• Global efforts for disaster management are focused on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and preparedness. Globally, this has not been as successful as hoped with damage and destruction following disasters continuing to increase. Disaster response (carried out through the Cluster system) continues to be an important undertaking by the international humanitarian community.
• Key documents include the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 - 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, key organisations include the inter-agency International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (established after the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s).

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Excerpt from the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 - 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, 2005, p 1.

Disaster loss is on the rise with grave consequences for the survival, dignity and livelihood of individuals, particularly the poor, and hard-won development gains. Disaster risk is increasingly of global concern and its impact and actions in one region can have an impact on risks in another, and vice versa. This, compounded by increasing vulnerabilities related to changing demographic, technological and socio-economic conditions, unplanned urbanization, development within high-risk zones, under development, environmental degradation, climate variability, climate change, geological hazards, competition for scarce resources, and the impact of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, points to a future where disasters could increasingly threaten the world’s economy, and its population and the sustainable development of developing countries.

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Excerpt from Handbook of Disaster & Emergency Policies & Institutions, John Handmer & Stephen Dovers, 2007: 3.

There are 90 million more human beings every year, and our societies and economies grow ever more complex and interdependent. The co-location of dense human settlements with potentially devastating natural and technological hazards suggests that we should expect more disasters, or at least more events that have the potential for disaster if not properly handled. The number of humans who exist in day-to-day survival mode, if not the proportion of the total population, appears to be increasing and is probably about half of all humanity - defined as those surviving on less than US$2 a day (UNDP, 2005) or who live in the 60 or so countries currently directly affected by warfare or violence. Such people have very limited capacity for disaster preparedness or recovery - their resources are inadequate for even their daily needs. This does not mean that people and their communities are not highly resourceful, but certainly their vulnerability to disruption is exacerbated.

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In the following interview, Dave Hodgkin discusses the relationship between poverty and disasters. Dave lives in Jogyakarta, Indonesia and works as an independent consultant in the humanitarian sector. He has worked in emergency shelter in a number of major disasters across Asia, and previously worked in community-based housing and the sustainable construction industry for over twenty years. He is a former student of the Human Ecology graduate program at the ANU.

Kim Williamson: So Dave, given the complex nature of disasters, how does poverty fit in to the picture?

Dave Hodgkin: Well, Kim, it’s an interesting topic … Disasters of course are only disasters because we are inadequately prepared for an event, not because of the actual event as such. If we all lived in earthquake resistant housing, then an earthquake ceases to be such a disaster… Preparedness for disasters then links directly to poverty: poor people are generally less prepared than rich people to deal with calamity. Firstly they tend to live in more marginalized locations, within flood zones, on steeply sloping lands, in dense urban settings etc. Secondly, due to lack of adequate finances for their (probably quite reasonable) housing aspirations, combined with a lack of structural knowledge or the capacity to hire someone with that knowledge, the poor often build more structurally inadequate buildings. This was so clearly the case in Jogjakarta earthquake, with the third highest recorded damage level per Richter scale in global history. People simply built badly, so at the first decent shake, it all fell down.

Finally, the poor - strangely enough - are often the hardest to assist! In Bangladesh in late 2007, millions of people living outside the protective cyclone embankments in the southern delta region of Barisal had their homes completely devastated by Cyclone Sidr. The government, quite responsibly, would not allow international agencies to assist these families to rebuild in such a clear danger zone. When then pushed to supply suitable land inside the embankments, although supportive, the government pointed out that if moved, millions and millions of similarly impoverished Bangladeshis would simply come and fill the ecological niche in these fringe areas.

Kim: It seems crazy that helping the poor can end up being more difficult than helping people who are more well-off …

Dave: Yes, it is strange and sad in many ways, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Helping anyone who has a higher capacity to help themselves is always easier than helping someone with a lower capacity. In fact this leads to some interesting dilemmas in disaster assistance. You can choose to help the low-hanging fruit: the easily targeted, highly receptive, well-organised villages where you know your program will be a great success, where you know the donor and the community will be happy. Or you can choose to help that fringe community, with really low education levels, very few members speaking the national language, high background poverty, more desperation, perhaps more dependancy on black markets and much less clear land ownership (such as the slum areas of Jakarta), where your program is going to take much much longer to implement and have remarkably less bang for your buck… An interesting dilemma.

Kim: Is it really that simple and if so what do people choose?

Dave: There is very little that is actually simple and clear in a disaster response. Certainly that reality exists, although I think that often we can only see in retrospect that we made such a choice: This community was easy to work with so we implemented more programs there - This one was difficult so we wound up what we were doing as best we could and moved on. Of course there is the trickle-down effect argument, classic rightwing politics. If we manage to get the easy half of a community back up and functioning quickly, they will return to employing and supplying services to the other half. I see this trend all the time in livelihoods sector, where large actors like Asian Development Bank and the World Bank will fundemantally implement this political viewpoint - and of course often achieve much more rapid success than agencies dealing with the more difficult end of the stick.

Kim: So how can we ensure we are targeting the right people?

Dave: Well, many of the big agencies like Oxfam, for example, have clear policies in place. They have a mission statement to always target “The poorest of the poor” etc. The reality is of course much more difficult than this. But at least they try, and through continous re-evaluation, they can determine if they are heading in the right direction. Though again, our temptation in evaluation is always to evaluate how well we did do, not how well we could have done… Though this too is important, as even in our industry workers need to have their positive efforts recognised and rewarded.

Kim: So Dave, how does all this fit in to sustainability and the bigger environmental picture?

Dave: Well Kim, as I am sure you can imagine, the poorest of the poor living in the most marginal circumstance face the greatest impact from climate change. The urban poor are pressed further and further to live in disaster-prone fringe areas. The rural poor face diminishing crops and natural resources, with limited skills to adapt. The story is obvious, the picture bleak!

Kim: So what are we or can we do about it…

Dave: There is a massive global shift at the moment towards disaster risk reduction, and community-based disaster preparedness has become a global aid industry catch cry, mainly funded through the cash that is floating around from Kyoto Protocol etc.

Kim: So is it working?

Dave: Nope.

Kim: Woah Dave, that’s pretty pessimistic!

Dave: Yep.

Kim: Can you clarify that?

Dave: Sure Kim. Global population levels are still rising (particularly amongst the poor). Global food supplies diminishing. Sea levels are rising. Climate change is devastating more and more crops. Rates of major catastrophes are going up. Fuel prices rising. All in all, it’s a very grim picture. These effects compound, situations become not twice as bad but four or ten times as bad. We have much larger impoverished populations living in ever more disaster prone circumstances with less and less capacity to deal with it. When we start talking about the scale of the ramping up of this… We simply do not have enough funds, and perhaps more importantly, we do not have enough skilled and capable workers to deal with this!

Kim: Not enough skilled workers?

Dave: Imagine the world before Aceh… A disaster of that size brought in unprecedented global aid, and every single global agency was stretched to bursting. There simple was not enough people around with the skills and knowledge to implement that scale of assistance in the timeframe required. And we wonder why 2-3 years later people were still living in tents…

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Excerpt from “Disasters, Development and Vulnerability” by Dr. John Twigg, Research Fellow in Disaster Studies, Benfield ULC Hazard Research Centre.

It is the social, cultural, economic and political environment that makes people vulnerable. This is most apparent in the economic pressures that force many of the poor to live in cheap but dangerous locations such as flood plains and unstable hillsides; but there are many less visible underlying factors - social and political as well as economic - that affect people’s ability to protect themselves against disasters or to recover from them.

Some groups are more vulnerable than others. Class, caste, ethnicity, gender, disability and age are all factors affecting people’s vulnerability. Those who are already at an economic or social disadvantage because of one or more of these characteristics tend to be more likely to suffer during disasters.

Vulnerability is not just poverty, but the poor tend to be the most vulnerable. In 1976 an earthquake killed 1,200 people and made 90,000 homeless in Guatemala City. Almost all of them lived in slum areas and many of their homes were in dangerous ravines and gorges - these were the only places they could afford to live in. The rich, in better constructed houses and safer locations, were affected far less.

More recently the Red Cross of Vietnam looked at flood victims in the Mekong Delta and found that the wealthier inhabitants were better able to withstand floods. They could afford to raise the foundations of their houses above the usual flood level, and because they did not depend on a daily wage for their economic survival their livelihoods were not so badly affected. The landless poor, on the other hand, had little room for manoeuvre: floods cut them off from food, fuel and income by stopping them from collecting wild vegetables, cutting firewood and working as day labourers.

poverty and disaster - a cyclone in India

A wealthy and a poor family live 100 metres apart near the coast of Andhra Pradesh in southeast India. The wealthy family has six members, a brick house, six cattle and three acres of land. The head of the household owns a small grain business and has a truck. The poor family (husband, wife and two children) has a thatch and pole house, an ox and calf, half an acre of poor land and sharecropping rights for another quarter of an acre.

When the cyclone strikes, the wealthy farmer has received a warning on his radio and leaves the area with his family and valuables in the truck. The storm surge (flood) partly destroys his house and the roof is taken off by the wind. Three cattle are drowned and his fields are flooded, destroying the crops. The youngest child of the poor family is drowned; their house is destroyed; both animals are drowned; their fields are flooded and the crops ruined.

The wealthy family use their savings to rebuild the house within a week. They replace the cattle and plough and replant their fields. The poor family does not have savings and has to borrow money for essential shelter from a local money lender, at exorbitant rates of interest. They manage to buy a calf but have to hire bullocks for ploughing their field, which they do too late since many others are in the same position and draught animals are in short supply. As a result, they go through a hungry period eight months after the cyclone.

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Our present era of globalization has changed the pathways through which natural hazard becomes humanitarian disaster …

- Natural Disaster and Development in a Globalizing World, Mark Pelling 2003, p xiv.
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© Kim Williamson 2008