ASIA: Humanitarian agency blames climate change for record floods
Updated
This year's deadly floods in China, Britain, and much of the subcontinent are forcing humanitarian agencies to change the way they respond to climate-related disasters. That's been the experience of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The federation is an umbrella group representing the world's national Red Cross and Red Crescent groups, which together represent the world's largest humanitarian network.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speakers: Peter Rees, head of disaster response at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva
REES: What we've seen is between 2004 to 2006 an increase from 278 to 482 emergencies of which floods have increased from 63 to 137 floods, and already this year where in 2007 we're at 75 floods. The increase of reported natural disasters is weather related. There's no real change in geophysical disasters, earthquakes and volcanoes, there is a significant increase in weather related or hydrological disasters and a related increase in epidemic insect infestations that is also related to the floods. So that's pretty much a tripling of disasters for us to deal with. Also what we're seeing is a significant increase in what we would call significant climate anomalies. These are events that are unique, such as the category 5 cyclone hitting Oman, the biggest flooding in the UK for 60 years, the number of these extraordinary events is significantly increasing which gives us a number of challenges.
PODGER: So how is this affecting the way the federation is having to respond?
REES: Well we have to respond not just more, and that's a big challenge. If you imagine any industry asked to scale up its production by 300 per cent in a couple of years, that's quite a challenge in itself. But more importantly what we've seen is two real issues to deal with here; multiple events have seen people multiply hit by disasters, so just last year five Category 5 cyclones hit the Philippines in a period of ten weeks. So if we go and help somebody recover from a cyclone, they then get hit again, and again, and again, this brings up real issues about recovery, livelihood, the increased need for psychological support. So that's one issue we're having to deal with that's fairly new to us. But the other one is this question of significant climate anomalies. This is where we've seen people affected by a disaster they've never witnessed before. We could look at the heatwave in Europe, cyclone in Oman, now what we see there is generally a population and a government that are not prepared, limited camping capacity of populations compared to those that are more frequently hit by disasters, poor hygiene practice, quicker spread of diseases, more need for psychological support, more panic at distribution centres. So this really requires a much different type of operational response for us than if we're dealing with a community that's more used to being flooded or hit by disasters.
PODGER: And I understand on that point the federation is keen to see more governments and national Red Cross and Red Crescent groups shift away from responding to individual disasters and put more of a focus on risk reduction and disaster preparedness?
REES: Certainly the impact of a climatic event can be mitigated with good community disaster preparedness work, and particularly the government to invest in flood defenses, in drainage, in general risk reduction or mitigation around the infrastructure of a country, urban planning - are new towns being built on flood plains? Has the government got sufficient search and rescue capacity? Have they done contingency planning at the community level, at the district level, at the national level to be able to operationalise the civil protection, the fire brigade, the Red Cross? Do we have common radio frequencies? This was a problem with Katrina. Do we have available clean water? Have we protected the electricity supply, the clean water supply? There's an awful lot the government can do.
PODGER: Now with developed countries obviously it's not such a big ask to move resources into these kind of areas, but for developing countries are enough resources available towards reducing the risks and anticipating disaster situations?
REES: Well I would have to say no, I mean when we look at our Red Cross, Red Crescent disaster response in countries with very weak government help infrastructure, with overall weak government infrastructure, the Red Cross takes on the main burden of that response along with our partners in the United Nations and the NGO sector. But what we have seen is that the developed world might have more money, they've got better infrastructure, they've got better early warnings, they've got better financial capacity, there are still issues though that we're not seeing such good community preparedness. We're not seeing people knowing what to do in the likelihood of a disaster. There's actually better resilience in Africa and the Third World than we're seeing in the developing world, which is quite an interesting phenomenon.
