India Commended for Disaster Risk Reduction Plans

During the recent Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), hosted in South Korea, India was one of the countries that were praised for their work on reducing risks during disasters. The UN’s special secretary-general on DDR, Margareta Wahistrom, commended the job India has done in the years since the massive Indian Ocean tsunami late in 2004.

India has taken many steps toward a system that will warn against upcoming natural disasters. It uses some conventional means of communication such as radio and television, but has also placed watch towers with accompanying loudspeakers in zones at risk for such disasters. It has even begun instituting text messaging warning systems.

The country is also working on a regional warning centre that gathers seismological data, so it can send alerts about earthquakes to areas along the coast. Once that centre is fully up and running, India will no longer need to depend on the warning systems already established in Hawaii and Japan.

The one area where Wahistrom would still like to see India improve is in allocating DRR resources to regions that will be at risk of disaster due to global climate change. Much of this disaster preparation would be long-term, developing systems to share information with other countries, not to mention devising technologies to manage the changes that might result from climate change.

Yet a recent joint report issued by the UN and the World Bank warns that tropical cyclones alone could add from $28 billion to $68 billion in damages to the world economy each year. Such cyclones are expected to increase as global warming progresses, and these are not the only types of natural phenomena that will experience such an increase. If countries do not start now to plan for quick ways to recover from these disasters due to climate change, and other types of natural disasters, the global losses could destroy most economies.

But since the 2004 tsunami, India has taken seriously its responsibility to establish a system that will both warn against and help recover from similar catastrophes. While the country still has work to do, it has made good progress, which the UN has recognized.