Development will limit disasters
Andrew Harding
Natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are often characterised as ‘acts of God’, indicating that they are random, unpredictable and unexplainable. In actual fact they are none of these things. They are eminently predictable – we know why they happen, we know that they will happen, we usually know where they will happen, we occasionally know when they will happen, we know what the consequences will be when they do happen, and without question we know when one has happened.
All these facts carry implications for scientific endeavour, international and national organisational effort, and resource allocation. At the same time our capacity, scientifically and economically, to plan for such events is growing, albeit not fast enough, tragically. Our present attitude to cataclysmic events is however fraught with danger. Hopefully we will now realise that our increasing population and civilisational complexity and fragility makes natural disasters highly dangerous to our survival as communities and as individuals and even as a species. What is equally important is that large sections of the human population are exposed to very much greater risks than others, but are also less able to insure themselves against such risk. It is surely not for no reason that the Pacific, surrounded by the US, Canada, Japan and Australia, has an excellent early warning system, and the Indian Ocean, surrounded by Indonesia, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Eastern Africa, does not. We know that an earthquake at this precise location was inevitable, and that only the timing was uncertain. We even have the example of the explosion of Krakatau in 1883, which killed 36,000 people and destroyed 140 villages, to remind us how large populations and whole communities around Sumatra in particular can be destroyed by the rubbing together of the tectonic plates. Given this knowledge, a vast tsunami was also inevitable. We could and should have done more to protect the people from the cataclysm. Even after it occurred we made no serious attempt to warn those in danger: the response was casual to say the least. Many would have died anyway, but many, too, would have been saved, if not in Sumatra, at least in Sri Lanka and Thailand, 2 or 3 hours away. Somalia is 6 hours distant, but even there coastal villagers died.
The creation of an early warning system in the Indian Ocean would have cost a mere US$20 million, a tiny fraction of the aid now pouring in. It is a tragic and catastrophic failure of international governance that is in reality responsible for the huge and rising death toll. We cannot prevent natural disasters, but the lesson of all this is that we can try to limit their effects. It is bizarre that the astonishing progress we have made in science and technology has been so misdirected that the latest mobile phone technology becomes rapidly available at low cost while simple measures to protect the lives and limbs of millions are labelled too complex or too expensive to implement.
The early warning system will no doubt now come into being. However, the problem is a much larger one. The early warning system will not be enough if the infrastructure in developing countries remains as degraded as it is. In Sumatra for example the geography makes transport inherently very difficult, and roads, hospitals, air travel facilities and electronic communications (very important in a period of administrative decentralisation) are all poor. As a result the death toll continues to rise there. Thailand on the other hand has coped well. Security is therefore to some extent a function of development itself.
The way forward then lies in taking the needs of developing countries very seriously, and taxpayers in the west will have to get used to this. In assessing these needs we should keep steadfastly in mind that security is not like an insurance policy, a luxury enabling the haves to keep their privileges. Every child, every human being has an equal right to a system of protection from natural disaster that does not depend on the economic performance of the society she lives in or the ambiguous outcomes of international meetings. That right at least is something we could and should erect as a monument to the dead.