Tearfund: Governments Must Learn Lessons From Tsunami

A new report out earlier in the week says that governments must learn lessons from last year’s Asian tsunami and carry out aid work differently.

|TOP|The report by the Christian relief and development agency, Tearfund, said governments must change the way they do aid work and commit billions of pounds to disaster prevention in the wake of what it called thousands of needless deaths in the tsunami.

“We are wrongly wedded to aid spending which ‘bandages wounds’ rather than ‘prevents injuries’,” said Tearfund’s Sarah La Trobe, author of the report. “This must now stop. We must re-think and learn the lessons of the tsunami and other recent disasters.”

According to Tearfund, at least 10 per cent of government humanitarian budgets must be redirected to reducing the risks of disaster faced by millions of people in the developing world.

The report, Learn the Lessons, claims that thousands of lives could have been saved in the tsunami as well as other recent disasters if simple, cost effective measures like evacuation training and storage of food and medical supplies had been put in place to protect vulnerable communities.

|QUOTE|“Rich countries spend billions of pounds protecting their people from floods, earthquakes and droughts. But we spend very little of our international aid budgets helping poor communities to do the same,” said La Trobe.

She added: “We have heard much about the need for a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean. But there are dozens of other steps that we are not taking that would similarly protect millions of people throughout the developing world.”

Tearfund warned in the report that disasters have increased during the last ten years killing over 675,000 people, affecting more than 2.5 billion people and costing an estimated US$690 billion in economic losses.

It’s not rocket science,” said Marcus Oxley, Tearfund’s disaster management director. “Simple, cost effective measures like evacuation and rescue training and storing food and medical supplies can ensure that disaster prone communities are able to cope with disasters when they strike.”

|AD|“Such preparation is vital because most lives are saved in the first 48 hours of a disaster. Very often, as was the case with the tsunami or hurricane Katrina, the first emergency relief from the international community does not arrive for a few days. The local people are always the ones that must respond quickly to a disaster.”

Tearfund attributed a lack of action from governments in reducing disaster risk to a lack of political will, as well as conflicting development demands on governments such as HIV/AIDS, conflict, debt relief and trade reform.

The organisation described the lack of investment by the global community in reducing disaster risks as “illogical and indefensible”, adding that it made “no moral or economic sense to ignore the urgent need for this when it is clear that investing in it saves lives”.

“One year on from one the biggest disasters we have seen, the international community must heed the lessons of the tsunami and other disasters,” says Marcus Oxley, “There was a time when we did not know where disasters would strike. But today we know which countries are most disaster prone.”

He said: “Richer nations have a moral obligation to adopt new thinking and action about aid budgets and programmes. It is inexcusable for the international community to mainly respond to disasters in a reactive way, when science and technology now enable us to predict risk and help vulnerable people prepare for disasters.”

La Trobe concluded: “Unless governments do this as a matter of priority, preventable disasters will continue to undermine the efforts of poor people to escape poverty and the efforts of rich countries to help them. Many governments, clearly, have not yet grasped the urgency of this race.”