Here is the full transcript of British academic Rachel Kyte’s talk titled “From Disaster Response To Disaster Prevention” at TEDxSendai 2012 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning everybody. It’s my great pleasure to be here today, and I would like to talk to you about resilience. This is a picture of my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Nancy Staples, and she’s leaning on the gate at the end of our gardens and the land that we worked two generations ago.
My earliest childhood memories are of her and my great grandmother and my grandfather, particularly at this time of the year, trying to eke out every ounce of nutritional value and economic value from our gardens and from the land. It was a time to harvest, but it was a time to preserve, to jam, to pickle in any shape, way or form, that nutritional value so we could take the bounty of the summer and extend it for us, our family, but also for the poorer members of the community around through the winter months.
She was born at the beginning of one world war, lived through a second, and survived polio. She was tough, and when I think about resilience, I think about her, her generosity, her toughness, and many like her in that generation. But let’s talk about resilience today.
The Hotel Montana
This is a picture of the Hotel Montana taken in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, just after the devastating earthquake in 2010. As you can see, it pancaked, killing 200 people or more as it did so. It simply wasn’t built to resist the shock.
Today we have to be more concerned about natural disasters than ever before. In the past 30 years, the economic losses from natural disasters have more than tripled. The number of natural disasters has actually doubled.
The Numbers
Let’s look at the numbers. Over the past 30 years, in low-income and middle-income countries alone, we have lost 1.2 trillion dollars due to damage. That is equivalent to the GDP annually of Mexico.
Another way to think of it is that it is equivalent to a third of all the official development assistance that we’ve given in the same time period. So think, that for every three dollars of overseas development aid that we’ve given, we’ve taken one and thrown it away. In the same period, the same 30 years, 2.3 million people have perished.
Climate Change
That’s the population of Namibia. This is something that we need to pay attention to. Climate change is ravaging especially poor countries.
Already this is not a phenomena for the future, it’s for us today. Already countries are trying to work their way through the complex nexus between a food crisis, a water crisis, and an energy crisis, and climate change is just making it more difficult and raising uncertainty. At the same time, over the next 40 years, we will add 2.6 billion people to the cities of the world, most of that in developing countries.
In fact, 90% of that growth will be in South Asia and Africa. And, between now and 2050, we will double the number of people exposed to cyclones, and mudslides, and collapse as a result of natural disasters in urban settings to more than 1.5 billion people. The lack of building codes, the lack of enforced building codes, will punish these people.
And it will be the poor, for it is always the poor, the most vulnerable, that will suffer most. So think of the story that we are beginning to understand. We have more and more disasters.
Investing in Resilience
Their intensity is being developed by climate change. Climate change is adding to uncertainty, and we have a path of urbanization that this civilization has never seen before. How do we invest in our resilience?
Well, there are two key ways. First of all, we actually have to change our growth path. We need to move to a greener and more inclusive growth now. Every country can start on that journey; we must mitigate and adapt to climate change. At the same time, we need to invest in disaster risk management. Disaster risk management must be part of development.
But it must also be considered a first line of defence against the uncertainty that is coming tomorrow. We need action in the public sector, we need frameworks in public policy, we need awareness and investment in the private sector, and we need civil society and communities to engage. Now, I talked to you earlier on about the hotel in Haiti, the Hotel Montana, that had pancaked, that had collapsed — this is where we are today, this is the Westin in Sendai, a gorgeous 37 storey hotel that survived the catastrophic earthquake on March 11th, 2011, the great Japan earthquake, with almost no damage at all.
Japan’s Example
In fact, it served as a disaster response centre. Disaster risk management is in the building code in Japan, disaster risk management in the building code is enforced in Japan. Disaster risk management is part of the curricula in schools in Japan, and disaster risk management, not disaster, is part of the public discourse, here in Japan.
So, every country, every government, can take steps now, no matter where they are on the development trajectory, to try to start to invest in their own resilience. But there is much more that can be done by the international community as well. Often, we offer too little, too late.
Between 1980 and 2009, the international community spent 90 billion US dollars on disaster-related assistance. But of that 90 billion, only 3.6% was invested in prevention and preparedness. The other 96% plus was invested in emergency response and reconstruction.
A Culture of Prevention
We have to change those numbers. We have to switch that graph around. In fact, we have to move from a tradition of response to a culture of prevention, a culture of resilience.
But let me give you an example of what does seem to start working. This is the island of Saint Lucia, in the Caribbean, a small island developing state buffeted by storms and hurricanes where landslides are, unfortunately, far too often, part of the rhythm of life there.