Expert says Vanuatu's huge cyclone damage bill unnecessary

Transcript

An emergency management expert says Vanuatu needs to introduce cyclone proof building codes to avoid more big damage bills from disasters like Cyclone Pam.

Vanuatu faces a huge reconstruction bill after it was devastated by the cyclone two months ago.

Jane Rovins (roe-vins) of New Zealand's Massey University spoke with Koroi Hawkins about the need for Vanuatu to rebuild stronger starting with an examination of the country's disaster management systems.

JANE ROVINS: A few weeks before the event I had actually spoken with the Vanuatu government and I spent a day with them looking at their disaster plans and how they would respond and how they would do disaster risk reduction. So the timing is all quite good and the thing about the system that Vanuatu uses, its a growing system that's being utilised in many other countries in the world. This idea that you have a national disaster management organisation, that is supported by disaster law. That then dictates, sometimes its a regional or district level depending on how big the country is and what their existing government structures are. Down to a local emergency or disaster management organisation. And that could be city level like RIMO here in Wellington it could be village level like you have in many parts of Africa or the Pacific where it gets very small. And that is the standard model being used world wide especially in non-centralised governments. And the beauty of this is it actually works better because the locals own their disaster management process. They have buy in, it uses local knowledge to include, some of the plans I have seen in places like Tonga. They actually take indigenous knowledge, taken from the community, especially the elders about when the typhoon comes we need to get the bananas up or we need to get different agricultural things taken care of. Or how to protect certain ones so that the trees don't fall over and they have incorporated that into their formal disaster management plan. And in my mind that is the absolute best way to do it. Local ownership, local knowledge, protecting local culture. Where you are not getting outsiders imposing systems.

KOROI HAWKINS: With the intensity and frequency of disasters predicted to increase and become more frequent and more intense. Imagine in a scenario where there is multiple countries hit at the same time, is there enough help out there to help the Pacific or any region for that matter?

JR: But there are multiple disasters going on at any one time. If you really think about it we are still cleaning up from Fukushima tsunami, we are still cleaning up from the Christchurch earthquakes, we've just had two earthquakes in Nepal, China region over seven, we've had typhoon Pam, you've got the Philippines that went Bohol earthquake and Typhoon Haiyan. So from a global donors perspective this is going on. Now in the Pacific because they are smaller islands, smaller populations the events from a financial standpoint are smaller than say Nepal or Fukushima so that is just a scale issue. So is the system working, is it working, that's a good question. But what I do think we need to be doing is practice what we are preaching and we are not doing that. We have been talking about disaster risk reduction in concrete forms in the way of building strengthening or tie-downs, hurricane education preparedness, evacuations for decades. And we are not doing it. We spend billions of dollars a year on disaster response and we spend pennies comparatively on disaster risk reduction when we know in the developing world that for every dollar we spend now we could save up to ten dollars in response if we did disaster risk reduction. And that is why the development agenda needs to include climate change adaptation. How are we going to deal with the sea level rises how are we going to deal with the increasing storms in the disaster risk reduction. How do we protect these communities from these increases and potentially stronger events, when they come. So the system is there, we are just not practising what we preach.