00.00 Images:
Aftermath Tsunami
Exts
King's College London
Mark
Pelling & Michael Redclift down stairs
Hurricane
Katrina aftermath
Guide Voice: Do natural hazards have to become
natural disasters? Increasingly there is a growing realisation
worldwide, that the vulnerability of many people in the developing
world could be reduced, if more effort and resources were spent on
risk reduction strategies, rather than purely responding to the
aftermath of disasters.
The damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans last
August shook the world, not just in terms of the sheer scale of the
destruction, but at the relative lack of preparation and the slow
response by the authorities at every level, in the richest,
best-resourced country in the world.
Researchers at King's College London have been studying natural
disasters dating from 1899 when a major hurricane hit Puerto Rico,
through to the Asian Tsunami, in all they’ve examined over
twenty-five major events, and have identified both political
failures that play a role in the disasters, and a political vacuum
or “space” that opens up in the aftermath.
00.52 SOT: Mark Pelling, Reader in Human geography, Dept
of Geography, King’s College London -“The
vulnerability in New Orleans when the emergency was called, is most
simply expressed through the inability of people to leave the city.
Those who didn’t have cars or those very few people who had
access to public transport were left in the city or people ... also
of course people chose to stay in the city to look after their
property, their pets and so on. But they weren’t given the
support after the disaster in a quick enough amount of time that
they really required so it's a failure of the state to provide the
resources and infrastructure to enable people to evacuate if
they wanted or to protect them if they
stayed.”
01.33 Images:
Tsunami aftermath
Carrying
supplies
People
cooking
Guide Voice: Their research shows that in the
wake of natural disasters radical political changes can occur. In
most cases a power vacuum opens up and different agents can fill
it, creating the conditions for potential political change, which
can be either positive or negative.
01.49 SOT Mark Pelling - “What we can
say is that the most important attributes that will determine the
outcome is the pre-disaster political context. So where you have an
open, inclusive system of governance, local government as well as
national, a reasonable balance of access to economic assets, then
you are quite likely to have a managed response that may well focus
on collective action at the local level being supported by a state.
Where you have an authoritarian government and a suppressed civil
society, you are quite likely to have still civil society
organising so local people will be the first to respond to a
disaster but the problem there is that the government may well
perceive that as a threat and so you have an authoritarian
backlash.”
02.34 Images:
New Orleans wrecked church
Stars
and stripes in doorway
Indonesia
/ Sri Lanka
Villagers
ploughing
Fishing
boats
Cooking
pots
Guide Voice: New Orleans also underlined that
if the citizens of the richest country in the world could suffer in
this way, how much more devastating are natural disasters in the
developing world, where people lack the resources of the USA?
When tectonic plates collided, setting off the tsunami in 2004,
the devastation it wrought on the region was immense, highlighting
the vulnerability of coastal populations in low-lying areas
exacerbated by poor housing and scarce resources. There is now a
growing recognition that under-development, poverty and
vulnerability to disasters go hand in hand, but there are things
that can be done.
03.08 SOT: Professor Michael Redclift, Department of
Geography, King’s College London - “The
countries that have been best at managing natural disasters have
built up what we call social capital – a kind of confidence
within a community or within communities and government and that
can often be very effective. So it’s the best way of
harnessing local people to meet the threat of natural disasters. So
we have to be there before, so we can be effective I
think.”
03.32 Images:
Sri Lankan Red Cross sign
Aid
workers
Guide Voice: The expertise of the International
Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in disaster
response is well known, but it too is now also working to reduce
risks, which pays dividends in human and financial terms.
03.44 SOT Anthony Spalton International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies -“I think,
in the tsunami context, the biggest issue really is
about…there’s a slogan going about' building back
better'. What we’re doing is working with communities in
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives to ensure that the recovery
work, the work that happens after the relief operation is over,
doesn’t build back new risks but reduces bigger risks not
only to future tsunamis but to other hazards such as flooding or
drought or volcanoes.”
04.14 Images:
Coastal flooding
Track
along roads
Wreckage
People
on floor cooking
Guide Voice: The research indicates that
planning for natural hazards should be a major part of everyday
development work, both at a local and a national level, in order to
reduce the vulnerability particularly of poorer communities
worldwide.
04.27 SOT Mark Pelling -“These
aren’t exceptional circumstances where anything goes, this is
part of development part of everyday life, the responsibilities
that we have to each other in everyday life are there perhaps even
more so in disasters.”
04.41 SOT Anthony Spalton - “We need
to invest more in working with communities, with households to
reduce their vulnerability, to use the jargon, to increase their
resilience to what are natural hazards but don’t have to be
natural disasters.”
04.55 Ends.
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