CENTRAL AMERICA: Tragedies Suffered; Lessons Learned

* Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

By Danilo Valladares GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 1 (IPS) - The disasters caused by torrential rains in South America have set off alarm bells in Central America, whose extreme vulnerability was made all too clear over the last few years when it was slammed by hurricanes Mitch and Stan and tropical storm Agatha."We need a real effort to prevent tragedies, and a more in-depth response to the housing problem," Roly Escobar with CONAPAMG, a Guatemalan movement of slum dwellers fighting for the right to decent housing, told IPS. The group reports that in this Central American country of 14 million people, 800,000 families life in 578 slums, 145 of which are in areas at risk of flooding and landslides, like hillsides, ravines or riverbanks. "For example, in the Santa Faz and Chinautla slums on the outskirts of Guatemala City, the soil is very sandy, which means the rain loosens it and causes mudslides," Escobar said. Something similar happened on Jan. 11 in Rio de Janeiro, where heavy rains caused huge landslides that destroyed entire "favelas" or shantytowns. The catastrophe triggered a debate over the lack of zoning laws and emergency plans in Brazil. More than 800 people have died and over 30,000 were left homeless by the flooding and mudslides in Brazil. Severe rainfall also caused landslides and heavy damages in Colombia and Venezuela in late 2010, claiming 174 lives in the former and 35 in the latter, and leaving more than 2.5 million people homeless in both countries. Central America is familiar with such tragedies. Hurricanes Mitch in 1998 and Stan in 2005, and tropical storm Agatha in 2010, as well as a lengthy drought in 2009 left thousands dead and caused billions of dollars in damages to infrastructure and agriculture, mainly in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Central America, which is made up of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, is classified as a high-risk area due to seismic activity, hurricane exposure and high levels of poverty. In fact, Honduras and Nicaragua are ranked third and fourth, respectively, on a list of 194 countries by Germanwatch, a Bonn-based non-governmental organisation that collates a variety of data in a number of areas, including climate change. The ranking is based on the proportion of damages caused by natural disasters between 1990 and 2008. El Salvador is not far behind. According to an April 2010 United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) report, nearly 88 percent of the territory and 95 percent of the population are vulnerable to natural disasters. David Vásquez of El Salvador's National Forum for Risk Management (MPGR) told IPS that given the natural disasters that have occurred in Central America and in other parts of Latin America, "the causes and consequences of the vulnerability of our population and territory must be recognised, in order to immediately take measures to address the situation." The expert said environmental protection, proper zoning, and investment in sustainable development "are fundamental to improving living conditions so that we don't continue to be victims of disasters, over and over again." No Central American country has a zoning law that bans the construction of housing in high-risk areas. In El Salvador, a bill has been in debate for over five years, "but it hasn't been passed because the association of construction companies and the financial sector are opposed to it," Ángel Ibarra of the Unidad Ecológica Salvadoreña, an environmental organisation, told IPS. "This law is crucial to corrective and future disaster risk management, and without it we cannot overcome the non-proactive character of this government," the activist said. He did, however, acknowledge some positive changes in the way the government is addressing the issue, such as improvements in information on threats of natural disasters, response capacity, and budgets. Costa Rican geologist Sergio Mora, who has worked in disaster risk management in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti and Yemen, told IPS that despite the region's vulnerability, "risk management is still seen as a cost, rather than an investment, when it should be incorporated as a state policy. "It is more beneficial, in electoral terms, to show up in a photo distributing bags of food to survivors than to sign a law to enforce construction codes or zoning regulations," he said. Mora believes recent weather events in the region have fuelled actions to improve disaster response. "But the effort has been focused on reaction, rather than prevention," he said. A key step in disaster prevention for the region was the approval of the Central American Policy for Integrated Risk Management (PCGIR), in 2010, which tackles issues like the environment, climate change, zoning laws and disaster management. Juan Pablo Ligaría, with the Guatemala-based intergovernmental Coordination Centre for Natural Disaster Prevention in Central America (CEPREDENAC), told IPS that the new regionwide instrument "is reflected in the risk management policies of countries in the region" and represents "a new approach to risk reduction." Find out more about the forces behind climate change - but also about the growing citizen awareness and new climate policies towards sustainable development http://ipsnews.net/climate_change/