LONDON (AlertNet) - The latest annual World Disasters Report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) urges aid organisations to harness the skills and ingenuity of local people affected by disasters and lay to rest the myth of helpless victims.

The report’s emphasis on building community resilience reinforces what the IFRC believes is the most effective resource available in managing disasters – people’s own survival strategies.

“People continually adapt to crisis, coming up with creative solutions,” Markku Niskala, Secretary General of the International Federation, said in a statement.

Whereas media reports often portray disaster-affected communities as helpless – and utterly dependent on external aid – the report describes people caught up in disasters as both resourceful and humbling.

In the past year, in story after story, from the earthquake in Iran to flooding in Sudan, the report highlights the strength, ingenuity and tenacity of people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It argues that analysing skills and resources available in communities prone to disaster and supporting communities’ ability to adapt to adverse conditions are key to reducing the impact of disasters.

And the report shows that local people were far more effective than outsiders in responding to massive natural disasters in India and Iran.

“Supporting resilience means more than delivering relief and mitigating individual hazards,” the IFRC’s Niskala said. “Local knowledge, skills, determination, livelihoods, cooperation and access to resources are all vital factors enabling people to bounce back.”

POVERTY AND VULNERABILITY

World Disasters Report 2004 includes more than 40 pages of tables to illustrate the key trends and statistics of all kinds of disasters.

They demonstrate the link between underdevelopment and vulnerability.

“Since 1994, disasters in countries of high human development have killed an average of 44 people per event, compared to 300 people per disaster in countries of low human development,” it says.

But the report also turns the spotlight on vulnerable people in wealthier countries, devoting a whole chapter to extreme weather in Europe, where heatwaves killed up to 35,000 people in 2003, most of them elderly. It looks at who is most at risk and how deaths can be prevented.

Backing up its argument that more aid are not always the answer, the report says that state aid after floods in Argentina actually held people back from finding ways to cope.

“(A) combination of joblessness, government subsidies and unfulled promises…has sapped community resilience among Santa Fe’s poor,” it says.

The authors go on to examine definitions of resilience, looking at the way Afghans have sprung back from traumatic times, and how Filipinos have motivated communities to participate in disaster preparation.

While focusing primarily on sudden onset natural disasters, World Disasters Report 2004 also looks at ways poor communities cope with survival in slums and are responding to the challenges of HIV/AIDS.

It examines the importance of sharing resources in the slums of the Indian metropolis of Mumbai and the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo.

The report paints a grim picture of the impact of AIDS on China, Kenya, Swaziland and Zambia.

In Zambia, young girls have turned to prostitution to support families who have lost their breadwinners to AIDS, while almost 40 percent of Swaziland’s are probably HIV-positive.

But there are rays of hope.

“If ever a picture were false, it is of Africa waiting with its hand out,” the report says. “No struggle was ever greater, no people more determined, more deserving of assistance that doesn’t simply dump food then run when the crisis momentarily seems to subside.”

See also:

Disaster toll tripled in 2003 amid quakes, heatwave

GRAPHIC-Global natural disasters 1994-2003

FACTBOX-Recent world disasters by numbers

FACTBOX-Report highlights disaster success stories

VIEWPOINT-Community resilience is key to disaster reduction

Experts seek lessons from a year of disasters