-Nearly six months have passed since governments and disaster experts gathered at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR) in Kobe, Japan, to hammer out strategies for protecting vulnerable communities the world over from the impact of natural hazards. Has there been much follow-up?
The answer is yes and no. On the positive side, nations have done a great deal to pool scientific resources for the creation of an early warning system in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. At the international level, a start has also been made in setting up an International Early Warning System covering a range of natural hazards.
Nations have also set up a so-called International Recovery Platform to consolidate and share the best experiences in putting lives and livelihoods back together following a disaster, as well as good practices in physical reconstruction.
In Britain, a study group on development and disasters has been founded as part of the UK Development Studies Association. Its first challenge might be to try to refocus some of the campaign rhetoric surrounding the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, this week.
Sitting as I am at the moment in Kyoto, it is a bit frustrating to watch from a distance the preparations for the G8 meeting. The first of the global Live8 concerts, held in Chiba, near Tokyo, was a bit of a whimper, with just 10,000 people attending. News of 200,000 people surrounding the castle in Edinburgh with a human circle was uplifting, though.
One wonders how disaster reduction will play into all this.
Of course, it is hard to nuance slogans such as "scar on humanity's conscience" and "double development aid". But the WCDR in Kobe capped a year-long series of major studies and high-profile reports stressing the point that disaster reduction is a mainstream part of sustainable development, and vice versa.
In news I've received of the upcoming G8 meeting, there is no mention of the WCDR in Kobe, or the launch of the International Early Warning Platform that took place during the WCDR. Nor is there any mention of the launch last month of the International Recovery Platform.
Rather, it seems the G8 is set to consider British Prime Minister Blair's proposal to set up an international scientific panel to assess the risks of huge catastrophic events including the impact of an asteroid hitting the Earth, another devastating tsunami, super-volcano eruptions and massive earthquakes such as the one that destroyed Tokyo in 1923.
Sir David King, Britain's chief science advisor, put it this way in an interview with the BBC: "What we're looking at is...setting up a system where the best scientific understanding of volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and near-Earth objects striking our planet is pooled together and brought to those international bodies through the appropriate channels."
This initiative has the potential for wasteful and confusing duplication. The U.N.'s inter-agency secretariat for coordinating disaster reduction strategy, the ISDR, has working groups that already bring together some of the world's best scientists on some of these hazards, as do many other initiatives through the International Council of Scientific Unions, UNESCO and other organisations.
In addition, the focus on very low probability events such as an asteroid impact is completely out of keeping with the G8's supposed focus on poverty reduction and development. The natural hazards that threaten the lives of most poor people in the world are drought and flood.
Instead of diverting attention by discussing the fiery impact of a comet or the huge tsunami that could conceivably wash over London if a volcano on the Canary Islands collapses into the Atlantic, the Gleneagles G8 meeting and any follow-up by NGOs and journalists should offer an opportunity to remind the world of the intimate links between disaster reduction and sustainable human development.
The G8 protestors' three demands - debt reduction, reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and an increase in development assistance - won't necessarily or automatically reduce risk among the most vulnerable people in Africa.
More generally, as I think about the links between development and disaster, it seems that the rhetoric of the Make Poverty History campaign that has brought out thousands in support of these demands drags us back to the bad old days when development was measured by inputs and not outputs.
The campaigners need to be reminded that any policy inputs ' whether more money, debt forgiveness and reformed trade rules ' will be ineffective unless they produce outcomes as specified by the Millennium Development Goals, the only globally agreed targets for cutting poverty and slashing mortality rates over the next 10 years.
Live8 and the lobbying surrounding the G8 summit have projected an image of Africans as pathetic victims. As I saw recently yet again at a meeting in Cape Town on community risk assessment, and later in Mozambique, there is a lot of very positive risk-reduction work going on in Africa.
That doesn't mean the three Gleneagles demands are irrelevant for Africa. But such good work should be acknowledged and supported. We need to back efforts to drought proof farming and prepare for floods at the grassroots, micro scale. At the national scale, good science in Africa should be supported where it is taking place.
I see a danger that Blair's proposal will extend the elite control of Big Science - the elite that has the money and toys to smash comets, quarks and DNA - into a new domain.
Living with drought, flood and climate change requires the efforts of hundreds of thousands of anonymous, local researchers, not a handful of laureates or profs and politicians with pop star envy.
In fact, these anonymous researchers exist and need support. They do not need leadership by an 'international expert panel' any more than local farming and environmental activists, trade unionists and other local leaders in Africa need to be 'helped' by pop stars.
I hope the newly formed UK Study Group on Disasters and Development will encourage discussion along these lines among NGOs, civil society campaigners, journalists and the officials who will be trying to programme a concrete follow-up to the G8.
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