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EDITORIAL
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February 16, 2018
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YESTERDAY the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council held this year’s first quarter nationwide simultaneous earthquake drill. The goal, really, is to promote disaster preparedness, and specifically to reduce disaster mortality.
In the face of imminent threats and the new normal, we cannot do business as usual. According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), there were 7,056 disasters recorded worldwide during the period 1996 to 2015. Natural hazards in the past 20 years killed 1.35 million people, more than half died in earthquakes and the remaining due to weather- and climate-related hazards.
In the Philippines, deaths caused by storms alone reached 15,880 during the period 2006 – 2015, significantly higher than the 3,970 storm deaths in the previous decade.
Reducing disaster mortality is the first of the seven targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). The Framework is an international document adopted by United Nations member states. It recognizes that the State has the primary role to reduce disaster risk but that responsibility should be shared with other stakeholders including local government, the private sector and other stakeholders.
Among the Sendai Frameworks’ targets are: reduce disaster mortality; reduce the number of affected people; reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services; and increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and DRR information assessments.
It is critical that we strengthen our disaster adaptation actions at national and local levels. Examples of these are preparing risk assessment, protecting ecosystems, improving agricultural methods, managing water resources, building settlements in safe zones, developing early warning systems, instituting better building designs, improving insurance coverage, and developing social safety nets.
The Sendai Framework for DRR urges us not to manage disasters but to manage the risks so that natural hazards would not turn into disasters. Reducing disaster risk is key.
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