Disaster Risk Management in Southeast Asia: A Developmental Approach

ASEAN Economic Bulletin Vol. 22, No. 2 (2005), pp. 229-39 ISSN 0217-4472 RESEARCH NOTE Disaster Risk Management in Southeast Asia A Developmental Approach Benjamin Loh Countries in disaster-prone regions need to manage their disaster risks with a long-term view, going beyond disaster reconstruction and relief. The heart of a country's strategy for managing disaster risk should not be loss-financing. Instead, it should be development enhancing to optimize post-loss funding capacity and budgetary discipline to protect and sustain current and future development projects. This is especially so when natural disasters directly threaten a country's development strategy and socio-economic performance. Against this background and drawing lessons from the recent Asian tsunami disaster, this article proposes that risk financing, disaster mitigation, knowledge management, and an accountability governance framework must be built into future and existing disaster risk management frameworks to protect and sustain current and future development projects of Southeast Asian countries. I. Introduction Are countries affected by the recent tsunami disaster trading an ounce of misery now for a pound of misery later? Although countries have access to liquid funds such as emergency aid and debt-relief following a disaster, they often exhaust their funding capacity on immediate recovery and reconstruction needs and may find themselves unable to fund new development projects after the reconstruction stage. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), and ASEAN Secretariat reported that the December tsunami disaster would have limited impact on the economies of ASEAN, with the ten member nations continuing to see an average growth rate of over 4 per cent in 2005 (ADB 2005; EIU 2005; ASEAN Secretariat 2005). However, we must take note of some secondary effects which may appear some time later such as rising poverty and unemployment, increasing fiscal deficit, and problems with balance of payments and international reserves. Some signs of such secondary effects are already showing. More than 400,000 tsunami survivors in Banda Aceh have lost their homes and jobs. Living in makeshift shelters, many have food ASEAN Economic Bulletin 229 Vol. 22, No. 2, August 2005 and clothing from aid agencies but are still unable to earn money to rebuild their lives. Important human capital has also been lost. The Indonesian Government estimated that 1,750 primary school teachers were dead or missing, and 700 to 1,100 schools in the province were destroyed by the tsunami. The EIU (2005) estimated that in Indonesia alone, nearly one million people could be thrown into poverty by the lingering effects of the tsunami's devastation. In India, the number of poor in the country could increase by 645,000. In Sri Lanka, the figure was estimated at about 250,000. In the Maldives, more than half of the country's residential areas were affected and more than 50 per cent of the population could fall into absolute poverty resulting in 23,500 additional people going below the poverty line. According to ADB (2005), the damage of the tsunami to Thailand was centred on southern resort areas that contributed about 3 per cent to the country's GDP. About 75 per cent of the world's major natural catastrophes between 1970 and 1997 occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, mostly in poverty-ridden developing countries (UNESCAP and ADB 2000). In Southeast Asia, the trend during the last three decades shows an increase in the number of natural disaster events and an increase in the number of affected populations (Figure 1). The number of reported natural disasters significantly increased to 383 in the last decade from 270 disasters between 1985 and 1994 and 207 disasters between 1975 and 1984. Moreover, the combined economic loss of US$28.3 million in the last decade was ten times greater than that of between 1975 and 1984. 177,572 people died in the natural disasters, including the Asian tsunami, in 2004 which was an exponential increase from the average of 1,909.6 annual deaths in the 1970s and 1980s. These figures must be treated with FIGURE 1 Economic and Human Impacts of Natural Disasters in Southeast Asia, 1975-2004 Note: Natural disasters in the above analysis include drought, earthquake, epidemic, famine, flood...