LONDON (AlertNet) - The United Nations is sponsoring a video project designed to protect vulnerable people in large cities that are prone to natural and man-made disasters, by trying to improve coordination between civil society and local authorities.

There will eventually be six videos in the series -- which is backed by the Tokyo-based U.N. University -- focusing on Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Manila, Mexico City, Mumbai and Tokyo.

Ben Wisner, the project's research coordinator, told AlertNet: "The mandate of the United Nations University is to do applied science in various domains, for the benefit of humankind, and in particular we've got to focus on human development. It isn't research for its own sake."

Wisner, who is based at the Environmental Studies Programme of Oberlin College, Ohio, in the United States, said the videos would analyse the complex factors that could lead to unnecessarily high death tolls from earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, droughts and volcanoes.

So far, the videos on Los Angeles and Mexico City have been completed

"Is it really nature killing us, or something else?" asks the narrator in the Mexico City video. Wisner and his colleagues believe that there is a great deal that humans could do to improve disaster response and mitigation in large cities.

The Japanese government had a particular motive in seeing the project conducted at the Tokyo-based U.N. University, after the shock of 6,000 deaths in the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Wisner said: "They thought that with all of their engineering and earth science experience there wouldn't be catastrophic effects like this of earthquakes."

About half of the Kobe victims were elderly people, mostly women. "They didn't have the sociological understanding necessary to have predicted that, or at least anticipated in some way that there would be different kinds of vulnerability, that certain people would suffer more and in different ways in a big disaster like that," Wisner said.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

"Japan had put a lot of emphasis on developing its natural science and engineering capability, and not that much into the social sciences."

The project's budget was limited to six conurbations with populations above 10 million, so the coordinators chose a sample that were prone to earthquakes and other disasters, covering a geographic and economic range.

"It was to do with looking at a number of megacities in Asia, where two-thirds of humankind lives, having an African city, and also a Latin American city," said Wisner.

The researchers asked people responsible for disaster planning and mitigation in each city how they defined the highly vulnerable people in their area.

In Japan, the elderly came top of the list, and were subdivided into five different categories. In contrast, the elderly were hardly ever mentioned by people interviewed in Mexico City, where squatters and street children featured instead.

"Municipalities have the resources, but they don't have people's trust "

Wisner and his colleagues looked at the relationship between citizen-based NGOs and local authorities. "What we found is the municipalities have the financial and the technical resources to help these at-risk groups of people, but they don't have much information about them, and they don't have the trust of these groups of people," he said.

"On the other hand, the NGOs have the trust, have the information, but they don't have the financial or the technical resources. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to get cooperation between the NGOs and the municipalities."

The researchers found that found that cooperation was difficult, given the sociological and political gulf that tended to separate the two sectors, but they attempted to highlight stories of successful collaborations between local government and civil society. "We try to draw out some lessons," Wisner said.

SEVERAL AUDIENCES

The videos were aimed at several audiences. "The products we produce aren't just journal articles and edited books -- which are quite useful and we do that too -- but we try to come up with modes of dissemination which can provoke discussion and be useful directly for training purposes. We try to do it in a way that is simultaneously useful directly back in those communities," said Wisner.

The film ends with the proviso: "Unauthorised reproduction strictly encouraged."

The Mexico City video was already being used on the street, said Wisner. "They put up a big sheet on the wall to block traffic and then invite the traffic police to have a beer with them while they watch it with several hundred inhabitants."

The videos use words, pictures and music that will be well known in each place. The narration is clear in its political analysis: "It's not like all this danger came from God or the devil or who knows where," says the narrator, a traditional calavera skeleton speaking Mexican slang. "It comes from our history."

The film describes how pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial rulers repeatedly quashed self-sufficiency, people's capacity to act for themselves and find solutions for their own problems.

"We know how to do a lot with a little"

The film reminds people that they don't necessarily need extensive resources to protect themselves. The narrator says: "We know how to do a lot with a little."

A group of retired firemen in the video offer safety workshops in their community. "There's a saying: 'A person who can't help others to live isn't fit to live'," says one of them.

Wisner said the films were also intended to be an educational resource for academic institutions, which often produce professionals who are technically competent but may have little knowledge of the vulnerable communities their work is intended to protect.

MIX AND MATCH

"The sort of person we have in mind, would be a professor of community health in Johannesburg, or a professor of civil engineering in Tehran, who probably has very straight, very mathematic engineering students, mostly male," said Wisner.

The U.N. University is planning to compile four of the videos on to a single CD.

"You could take ten minutes of Mexico City, put it together with five minutes of Mumbai and bring out certain issues and then you'd provide the students with background reading. You'd maybe give your engineering students something different from your students doing a master's in social work or your medical students."

Wisner said: "The CD would be a way of raising consciousness about the importance of social factors and the delicacy, complexity and significance of relationships between municipalities and NGOs."

In the Mexico City video, the narrator says: "We have ideas. The government should listen to us for real. We should have a dialogue, and exchange of abilities."

Virginia García Acosta, a historian interviewed in the film, says: "There are two sides to paternalism. One side takes on being the father, and the other assumes the role of child."

"They've done a lot of safety drills, but I don't really think that they're prepared"

One of the Mexico City residents interviewed is a woman who lost two cousins in a massive earthquake that rocked Mexico City in 1985, killing about 9,500 people and injuring 40,000. She says: "They've done a lot of safety drills in hospitals, clinics and schools, but I don't really think that they're prepared."

Wisner said that there were already channels that could be used to distribute the video for teaching purposes, such as the networks set up during the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction between 1990 and 2000, and Local Agenda 21, community initiatives encouraged by the 1992 U.N. conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

"There are a lot of existing networks," said Wisner.

GLOBALISATION FROM BELOW

Wisner said that there was a third potential audience for the videos. "We also need to be in contact with organisations in civil society that maybe haven't even defined themselves as interested in disasters." He said that there was a burgeoning international environmental justice movement.

"People like the mothers of East L.A. -- Hispanic women who are working on air pollution issues because their children get asthma. They've banded together to stop a hazardous waste incinerator from being located in their community," said Wisner.

"It doesn't take much additional information, or much additional resource to enable them to focus also on the flood hazard or the earthquake hazard or the fire hazard in their community, having done this other work around their children's health."

However, Wisner said that he had some doubts about the international reach of the CD. "I'm a little sceptical about the particular techie way it's been packaged," he said.

He pointed out that colleges and universities in many places would not have the equipment to use the CD. In some places, he said, you would be lucky to find a blackboard.

"I'm happy with the support the U.N. University has provided," said Wisner, "but one has to recognise that it has its institutional limits."

The U.N. University was founded in 1978. Apart from being a coordination centre, it runs two academic programmes, one on peace and governance and one on environmental and sustainable development. The video programme on urban and social vulnerability to disasters comes under the second category.

"It's an early example of what you could call globalisation from below. "

Wisner said that after the explosion at Bhopal, India, in 1984, which killed more than 3,800 people and disabled about 11,000 when toxic gas escaped from a pesticide plant, a local group made a video. They sent it to Institute, West Virginia, where Union Carbide had an almost identical plant.

"The workers and the surrounding community saw this and it blew their minds. They discussed it and made a video tape of their discussions and their local circumstances, and they sent it back to Bhopal, "said Wisner. "It's an early example of what you could call globalisation from below.