The tipping point of disaster prevention

After decades of international disaster response -- and the analysis, workshops and rhetoric that have gone with it -- an important new truth has lately been discovered:

Prevention is better than cure.

More precisely, says Jan Egeland, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This, translated into monetary terms, means that one dollar invested in disaster reduction today can save up to seven dollars tomorrow in relief and rehabilitation costs, he reminds us.

Yet the prevention axiom, as simple as simplicity itself, is incredibly difficult to implement. Disaster relief is straightforward compared with the complexities of reducing the risk of the disaster in the first place. In fact, according to speakers at a public meeting in London on Nov. 1, even persuading key players that prevention is paramount is proving exceedingly hard.

After a 30-year career in disasters, Ken Westgate, Regional Disaster Reduction Advisor for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says he is only now seeing the light go on in government minds.

And Terry Jeggle, of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, who also spoke at the meeting said afterwards:

"I would not say we have yet reached a tipping point but we may have reached the corner, around which is the tipping point."

The meeting, organised by four key development bodies in the UK as part of a series linking disaster risk reduction to development, seemed mostly to be attended by aid agency delegates - many of whom are already sold on the idea of disaster risk reduction.

Some national governments will be much harder to persuade. Many have recently set up disaster agencies. Perversely, this may lead mainstream ministries to feel absolved from integrating disaster prevention into their policies.

Some target countries, says Westgate, have "very stubborn, not terribly democratic government systems that are highly centralised. It's a political and governance issue. It's a quantum leap."

Neither speaker gave the impression that a sea change in tackling disasters is going to be implemented any time soon, though they could point to changes in attitude in individual countries and U.N. bodies.

But Egeland, in an article in The Hindu, calls fervently for this change. He points out that global warming has made it more urgent to switch to put disaster risk reduction first.

"Risk reduction must be woven into the fabric of international development and lending policies," he writes. "I am convinced that if we actively employ risk reduction measures, deaths from natural disasters can be cut dramatically in the coming decades … let's seize this opportunity. Lives depend on it."