(Item 5 of the Agenda)
22. LE HUU Ti, Economic Affairs, Officer, Water Resources Section, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), described regional experiences in flood management, based on Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) principles. He highlighted the various approaches of flood control followed in Japan, Bangladesh and Korea and emphasized the need to adopt Strategic Planning and Management (SPM) towards implementing IWRM. He advocated the need for capacity building and for institutional partnership to pursue such approaches. He referred to the ESCAP-FAO partnership to demonstrate these concepts in the Mekong River Basins. He also suggested that there were enough guidelines, enforcing laws and regulations and that the focus should be placed on their implementation.
23. Masaru ARAKIDA, Senior Researcher, Asian Disaster Reduction Center (ADRC), made a presentation on information sharing for effective disaster management, and also presented the draft outcomes of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR) held in Kobe in January 2005. He mentioned that nearly 90% of the people affected by natural disasters between 1975 and 2002 were from Asia, due both to its large population and to its high population density. The ADRC focused its work on information sharing, human resource development, and building community capabilities. He explained further that information sharing consisted of expert meetings, Internet databases, and various computer tools. In terms of human resource development, Mr Arakida described a tsunami disaster reduction awareness project in Papua New Guinea (PNG) that was started in response to the loss of 2 200 lives in 1998 and noted that it helped to prevent deaths when another tsunami hit PNG in 2000. He said that community capabilities were built through a four step process that included learning about disasters, surveying the local community, developing a community hazard map, and conducting group discussions to share the information within the community.
24. Mr Arakida highlighted the Hyogo Framework for Action that arose from the WCDR listed five priorities for action by 2015:
ensure that disaster risk reduction was both a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation;
identify, assess, and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning;
use knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels;
reduce the underlying risk factors;
strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels.
25. Victoria BANNON, Programme Coordinator, Legal Affairs Unit, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), discussed legal issues surrounding the international response to natural disasters. She said that although national policies and preparedness had improved greatly, there were still situations where an international response was required. She indicated that some of the important legal issues were the process of offering, requesting, and accepting assistance; access to affected populations; the import of relief goods; the legal immigration status of relief personnel; and the procurement of relief goods. She noted that these issues were being studied through the International Disaster Response Laws, Rules and Principles (IDRL) project, which aims to improve legal preparedness for natural disasters by ensuring that legal and regulatory frameworks, at all levels, were harmonized so that international disaster response could be provided quickly and effectively to the highest possible standards for the benefit of affected communities. The three main types of legal challenges faced in improving legal preparedness were the inflexibility of normal procedures (which could lead to delays in the arrival of relief assistance), open borders (which could lead to reduced quality of relief and a lack of accountability), and contradictions between different laws and policies. She said that there was a need to encourage governments and organizations to anticipate the legal aspects of international disaster response and to find ways to resolve them before disaster strikes.
26. Chris CHIESA, Senior Manager, Pacific Disaster Center (PDC), described mechanisms for strengthening early warning systems of vulnerability information, and of hazard forecast systems. He pointed out the importance of understanding and modeling the processes - acquiring, processing and managing data; sharing and dissemination of data/information; and associated practices and standards. Utilizing the PDC warning system for tsunamis as an example, he illustrated the steps involved in the process and highlighted key issues such as preparedness, issuance of alerts, egress routes, etc. He then described an application of these data in PDC’s “Asia Pacific Natural Hazards and Vulnerability Atlas” which provides web-based access to geospatial information related to current and past hazard events. It can be accessed at http://atlas.pdc.org.
