Everyone who works in aid -- whether they focus on disaster response or long-term development -- knows that reducing the risk of disasters is of paramount importance.

Communities need projects that help prepare them for the worst, so that when disaster strikes both the short-term trauma and the farther reaching fall-out can be adequately managed.

The problem, as a conference in London has heard, is that not many people actually want to do it.

At one end of the spectrum, groups that are trained and equipped to respond to individual emergencies are not naturally inclinded to think about preparation for disasters that have not yet happened.

At the other, organisations involved in development can view disaster work as a short-term issue outside their longer-term remit.

Some groups are making the effort to redress the balance. The Department for International Development (DFID), in the UK, for example, now allocates 10 percent of funding for emergency responses to projects that will help prevent the next disaster, according to Jack Jones, humanitarian programmes manager for CHASE, a department in DFID.

But to make matters worse, many people who live in poverty turn out to be pretty uninterested in protecting themselves against disasters, said Terry Cannon, a development specialist at the University of Greenwich.

Speaking to a meeting held by the Overseas Development Institute, the Development Studies Institute, DFID and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development (APGOOD), Cannon said communities have more pressing interests such as next week's meals and next year's school fees.

He cited a flood protection workshop in Yemen. By the end of it the empowered locals had produced not a flood plan, but a traffic accident protection project. Yet they have a point; a subsequent analysis by Cannon revealed that Yemenis are more likely to die in traffic accidents than in floods.

The Yemenis might have sympathised with the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, said Cannon, who said: "Any idiot can face a crisis. It is day-to-day living that wears you out."

But disasters are on the increase. Persuading locals to protect themselves against remote-seeming threats instead of immediate ones is becoming a more urgent task.

For development really to take disaster preparation on board, projects are going to have to start doing new, sometimes conflicting, things, said Cannon. They must preserve natural sources of protection against hazards, even if this prevents their economic development.

One of the trickiest questions of the day was articulated by Tom Mitchell, of the Institute of Development Studies.

"Does focussing on a community and what they know still hold in the face of climate change - with very different challenges coming up?"

Any answers?