Billions needed to save Asia-Pacific from climate disasters
Updated
Figures released last year showed three-quarters of all people killed in 2007 by natural disasters were in Asia. Now, the aid agency World Vision has issued a warning that tens of billions of dollars need to be invested to protect coastal communities in the Asia Pacific region from climate change, or decades of development is at risk of being washed away or destroyed. World Vision says more money needs to be spent on village and city infrastructure that can withstand storms and rising sea-levels, and children need education in disaster preparation.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Dr Brett Parris, World Vision Chief Economist
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PARRIS: I think probably the main point is that climate change is not something that is happening in the future. It is happening right now to our communities in the Asia-Pacific. This is not just about models and simulations and rejections. It's happening now, seeing sea levels rise and that's already affecting coastal communities. We're realising that climate change is hitting the poor, first and worst they are the most vulnerable. They are the most strongly affected already.
Also just the sheer scale of the threat to the Asia-Pacific is something that I think we all need to be more aware of.
LAM; And, can you give us an idea of what are some of the regions that are most at risk?
PARRIS: Well, Asia has some of the biggest mega-cities, cities more than ten million people and very low lying coastal areas, like Calcutta, Shanghai, Beijing and so on, so the big mega-deltas in Asia as well, Bangladesh, one of the biggest deltas in the world, the Irawaddy Delta in Mynamar, Mekong Delta in Vietnam, these are particularly vulnerable areas. But also many of the very low lying areas in the Pacific, Papua New Guinea has something like about 100,000 people on low lying islands that are vulnerable.
LAM: So in a way, it's sort of the tyranny of geography, isn't it. How do we make these coastal regions more resilient, better prepared?
PARRIS: There is a lot that can be done. The sea level rise projections are now expected to be anything from 80 centimetres to two metres over the next century and so that is making communities very vulnerable. So some preparations are going involve retreat from the coast as it erodes land and so on, but also reducing peoples vulnerability to tropical storms and cyclones coming through by building shelters, by improving access roads, improving water resources and so on.
LAM: And when you say retreat, you have to move them to higher ground and possibly teach them a new way of living. How can you minimise the trauma of such a move?
PARRIS: Well, that's a very good question and it's often very difficult, some of these people have been coastal communities for centuries. One of the people that was interviewed for the report in Papua New Guinea, their island had been evacuated because of a volcano, not because of climate change, but they had been relocated to the coast in PNG and they said how can you take a fish and put him in a forest? So communities will be needing to learn new ways of life and that is traumatic.
LAM: And do you have an idea of how local governance are reacting or responding to these proposals?
PARRIS: Well, I think it varies from place to place, but some local governments have done a tremendous amount, like Bangladesh, for example. The cyclone they had in 1970 killed more than 300,000 people. They had another one in 1991 that killed more than 140,000 people. But Bangladesh did a lot of work in preparing communities and in cyclone shelters and so on and so on, a lot of other measures as well. The Cyclone Sidr that came through last November, was a category five cyclone. It was one of the biggest category of all, most powerful and it killed just over 4,000 people. It still terribly tragic, but a lot can be done to minimise damage and minimise casualties.
LAM: So are there any examples apart from Bangladesh, concrete examples of relocation that have worked, that other countries perhaps could use as a blueprint or perhaps just learn some lessons from?
PARRIS: I am not aware of many examples of that. There have not been many examples of large scale evacuations yet. The main one that has happened so far is from the Cartaret Islands in Papua New Guinea. Those people had to be evacuated because their atoll has basically been submerged. Tuvalu is also in serious danger there. The salt water is intruding into their freshwater supplies now, so they are no longer able to grow a lot of the crops they used to be able to. But we are still in the relatively early stages of physical relocations, but I think a lot of governments around the world are being increasingly concerned by this and how you integrate communities into other parts, because Asia is very densely populated. It's not as if there is a whole lot of land to go around, so communities are happy to be reintegrated into land where there is already communities and already traditional owners who have been there for centuries as well.
LAM: Mention was made of getting the children ready. What sort of disaster preparation are we talking about, where children are concerned?
PARRIS: Well, education is critical, education of girls as well as boys. In some countries, the girls are not taught to read, are not taught to swim, but even things as simple as teaching children to swim has been able to help them. But also making sure their schools are safe, that their schools are well constructed. I mean one of the things we saw in the earthquake in China was something like 17,000 children killed, because related to poorly constructed schools, and that is not just China obviously, that happens in a lot of places. Sometimes contractors skimp on construction of the schools and children. Another one of the stories in the report are saying that we want safe schools, we don't make these decisions about who builds what and where. We're vulnerable and we need adults to actually take care of us and to make sure we are given a safe environment and not build the schools on the worst land, the most low lying land, the land that is vulnerable to landslides and so on that nobody else wants. This is what has often happened.
LAM: Brett, you mentioned earlier the fact that climate change is already upon us. Is there time to do all this preparation?
PARRIS: Yes, a lot needs to be done, but the sea level projections over the course of the century are very serious, but it's not happening overnight either. I mean we are looking at more intense hurricanes as the sea warms. The hurricanes pick up energy from the warm ocean water, so we are looking at more serious cyclones, and we are looking at more serious drought. There are periods of intense rainfall and that makes people very, very vulnerable.
