An earthquake survivor clears rubble at his destroyed house in Balakot, Pakistan. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
LONDON (AlertNet)- Just over ${esc.dollar}1 would have saved a child from being buried alive in the Kashmir earthquake, says a report on disaster prevention. In Pakistan, 500 children were crushed to death when their school collapsed, yet it only costs around ${esc.dollar}700 to make a school quake-resistant.
Similarly, a dozen ocean floor sensors could have saved tens of thousands of people who died in the Indian Ocean tsunami. For most, safety was only a 15-minute walk away, but they had no warning before the waves crashed down, claiming more than 200,000 lives. The cost of the sensors would have been just ${esc.dollar}200,000.
These are a few examples cited by international relief agency Christian Aid in a report issued on Thursday called &${esc.hash}39;Don&${esc.hash}39;t Be Scared, Be Prepared&${esc.hash}39;, which calls for more effort and money to be invested in disaster prevention.
&${esc.hash}39;Disaster risk reduction is about saving lives and sparing people the grief of losing their loved ones or the loss of a home or job. But it also makes good economic sense,&${esc.hash}39; the report says.
In 2004 disasters caused about ${esc.dollar}123 billion worth of damage. But the World Bank and the U.S. Geological Survey estimate that ${esc.dollar}1 spent on risk reduction can save ${esc.dollar}7 in relief and repair costs, to say nothing of lives saved.
If the world does not wake up to the urgent need for risk reduction the World Bank predicts the cost of helping people after disasters in the next decade could be ${esc.dollar}10 trillion.
&${esc.hash}39;When disaster strikes, there is a moral duty to respond, spurred on by media and public interest. But there is no similar concern to look beyond the immediate crisis &${esc.hash}39; to understand the real causes of disaster and take preventative action,&${esc.hash}39; the report says.
&${esc.hash}39;The lesson of this year of catastrophe, from the tsunami to the Pakistan earthquake, is that we can ensure that natural disasters do not have these unnatural, and terrible, consequences.&${esc.hash}39;
WIND-UP RADIOSAccording to the 2005 World Disasters Report, compiled by the global Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, the number of natural disasters averaged 728 a year between 2000 and 2004. That&${esc.hash}39;s more than double the yearly average for the preceding decade.
Although cyclones and quakes can strike anywhere the resulting devastation is far greater in poorer countries.
The last major earthquake to hit San Francisco, where tall buildings stand on rollers, killed 62 people. An earthquake in Turkey of similar magnitude killed 17,000.
But the report says risk reduction measures don&${esc.hash}39;t have to be high-tech or expensive.
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Building a house in India using local materials with earthquake and cyclone-resistant features costs about ${esc.dollar}215 more than one without. Making an existing school quake-resistant costs ${esc.dollar}660.
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In Sri Lanka, new homes are being built with flat roofs for people to climb onto in the event of another tsunami.
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Wind-up radios, which cost ${esc.dollar}35, can help warn fishermen and coastal communities about cyclones, floods and tsunamis.
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In India, small task forces have been trained in search and rescue, contingency planning and first aid. In 2004 these teams saved many lives after floods struck Assam in the northeast.
&${esc.hash}39;&${esc.hash}39;Community based, low-tech methods have been proved to work,&${esc.hash}39; says the report&${esc.hash}39;s author Anjali Kwatra. &${esc.hash}39;In Bangladesh, Christian Aid partner organisations built cyclone shelters after the 1991 cyclone killed some 140,000 people. Six years later there was an even more lethal cyclone but only 100 people died because they knew how to take refuge.&${esc.hash}39;
Risk reduction is also effective in slow-onset disasters such as famine. Constructing dams to help with irrigation and cultivating sturdy traditional crops like millet, rather than maize which requires a large amount of water, could help avert food crises in parts of Africa.
Christian Aid said it welcomed Britain&${esc.hash}39;s proposal to earmark 10 percent of its humanitarian spending for disaster reduction and urged other donors to take similar steps.
The report called for disaster risk reduction to be part of all future emergency and development programmes and stressed that local communities must be involved.
A sophisticated tsunami warning system like the one being installed in the Indian Ocean is useless if the alerts do not get through to the people at risk.
&${esc.hash}39;Ensuring that people understand the message and act upon it immediately will require a concerted education campaign accompanied by a multi-media warning signal, which may include everything from officials on bicycles blowing whistles to television broadcasts and text messages,&${esc.hash}39; the report says.
The importance of education in saving lives during the tsunami was shown on the island of Simeulue off the Indonesian province of Aceh where fewer than 20 of the 78,000 inhabitants died.
People knew to run inland after feeling the quake because this knowledge had been passed down the generations following a tsunami a century before. By contrast the death toll in some parts of Aceh was 90 percent.
Underlining the urgency of disaster prevention, the report highlights the risk that the faultline will rupture again, potentially wreaking the same devastation as last year&${esc.hash}39;s tsunami.
&${esc.hash}39;It&${esc.hash}39;s not a matter of if, but when,&${esc.hash}39; Barry Hirschorn, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, told Christian Aid. &${esc.hash}39;It&${esc.hash}39;s an elastic band, waiting to snap.&${esc.hash}39;
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