Region - Disasters are increasing; disaster preparedness is not
New reports from UNDRR and ECLAC outline many recommendations the region should take to prepare and attempt to mitigate systemic risks from natural disasters.
A new regional assessment from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) provides a top level framework for understanding the challenges of natural disasters moving forward after the pandemic.
The specific challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic have highlighted systemic risks and the hurricanes that hit Central America last year demonstrated the dangers of facing overlapping disasters. While pandemic deaths are included, the report doesn’t attempt to measure the economic damage as it has previous natural disasters.
Above: Graphic from the ECLAC/UNDRR report
A parallel report from ECLAC and UNDRR provides greater detail on the disaster preparedness and response in the Caribbean and has updated numbers regarding the economic damage done by Covid-19.
Key takeaways from the reports
Latin America and the Caribbean’s economic development has faced regular setbacks due to natural disasters. This is obvious but also rarely acknowledged in forward thinking planning. Analysts doing economic projections ten years into the future can’t predict exactly what type of disaster will hit a country or what the impact will be, but the history of the past few decades shows economic forecasts regularly derailed by various natural disasters. Last year’s pandemic is a key example, but far from the only disease challenge the region has faced in the past decade that has hit economic growth (i.e. outbreaks of Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya).
Due to climate change and increasingly interconnected systems, disasters are growing more frequent and more impactful. While natural disasters are often treated as isolated events, many disasters including hurricanes and epidemics are increasing due to systemic challenges. Even if we separate out and treat the human costs and economic damage from the pandemic in 2020 as a statistical outlier (which we shouldn’t), the next decade will almost certainly see a greater amount of damage from natural disasters than the previous decade.
The combination of climate change plus urbanization is a key threat to Latin America in the coming decade. Most readers likely understand how urbanization and climate change both individually contribute to risk, but I liked how the report highlighted the insight that the two trends overlap in ways that increase the risks populations will face in Latin America. The nature of cities and densely packed populations increases the complexity of disasters when they occur and creates systemic level risks.
Latin America’s approach to disasters has been reactive instead of proactive. Far more focus and emphasis is placed on reconstruction after disasters occur than on preparations. The report specifically calls for civil society to do more to hold governments to account when they fail to prepare for natural disasters, not just when disaster recovery and reconstruction goes wrong.
What should be done vs what will be done
These reports are just the most recent of many reports on similar topics. This report from ECLAC in February provided greater detail on how countries can implement a risk reduction framework. The Council on Strategic Risks has had several strong recent reports on how the Biden administration should manage the global threats from climate change.
The governments of Latin America and the Caribbean should implement every recommendation in the reports above, particularly those regarding building disaster planning and mitigation into development plans and building out greater information monitoring and sharing.
But they won’t.
The region lacks resources, particularly after the pandemic, and those resources are more likely to be spent dealing with urgent and immediately visible needs than on mitigating hypothetical (though near certain) disasters of the future. Further, politicians rarely receive credit for preventing a disaster that doesn’t occur or limiting the damage from a disaster that might occur after they have left office.
That may sound depressing, but acknowledging that political reality is necessary for civil society and the private sector to create campaigns that encourage politicians and voters to support proactive efforts that can help protect the region’s population.
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