The EM-DAT database (a WHO initiative) is a huge repository of information about disasters that has been built up over more than 40 years, and Advance Aid has already been mining this data to help develop its business plan – if you can use historical data to predict where disasters are most likely to happen, you can certainly fine-tune your pre-positioning and warehousing strategy.

Now SciDevNet has produced a whole section of its website devoted to covering “Remote Sensing for Natural Disasters” .

SciDevNet’s Sian Lewis puts this into context, “Developing countries suffer more than 95 per cent of all deaths caused by natural disasters.  Their high population densities and poor infrastructure, coupled with unstable landforms and exposure to severe weather events, makes them particularly vulnerable…Just last year (2008), natural disasters affected 214 million people, killed more than 235,000 and cost more than US$190 billion.”

And she goes on to outline how satellite technology can make a difference, “Remote sensing — the science of acquiring information about the Earth using remote instruments, such as satellites — is inherently useful for disaster management. Satellites offer accurate, frequent and almost instantaneous data over large areas anywhere in the world. When a disaster strikes, remote sensing is often the only way to view what is happening on the ground.”

But there are, inevitably, problems – shortage of money, low bandwidth Internet connections, the lack of active space programmes (understandably) amongst developing countries, and a linked lack of political awareness of the role that satellite data can play in helping with development and combating disasters.

But there are developing countries with satellites – the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced plans in October for two Earth observation satellites, which will join six already in orbit.  South Africa launched its first commercial-grade satellite in September.  Brazil, China, Thailand and Vietnam have satellites, as do Algeria and Nigeria.

Lewis ends with a plea, “The time is ripe for engaging developing country researchers and policymakers in remote sensing for disaster management.  Data and software costs are plummeting, information communication technology is developing quickly, and tools such as Google Earth are starting to get policymakers enthused about satellite imagery.”

The people most at risk are the 300,000 mainly Somali refugees in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps.  Kakuma is in northwestern Kenya and Dadaab in the east on the border with Somalia.   The overcrowded Dadaab complex of three camps was built to hold some 90,000 people but its population has swollen to three times that, in the process becoming home to more refugees than any other site in the world, according to the UNHCR.

U.N. aid agencies have activated contingency plans, bringing food, water treatment chemicals and mosquito nets to flood-prone areas.  The flooding, which follows on from a period of drought, is also bringing disease in its wake – the WHO is reporting that cholera has already infected 10,000 people this year in Kenya.

Elsewhere in Kenya, hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in the central part of the country after mudslides, brought on by the heavy rain, destroyed houses.

George Monbiot in The Guardian puts it all down to our fear of death. Another view is that the stronger the scientific evidence gets, the more certain it is that we are going to have to change our treasured lifestyles – lifestyles that have caused the problem in the first place. And it is this threat to our lifestyles that brings out the Inner Denier in everyone.

Now the Environmental Justice Foundation has brought out a report that quantifies the human damage that global warming is going to cause. The report, “No Place Like Home”, highlights the humanitarian plight of an estimated 150 million people whose homes, it says, will be lost as a result of climate change by 2050. These ‘climate refugees’ are not recognised under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and the report calls for a new international legal agreement to help them survive.

With the Copenhagen conference looming ever larger, and expectations of any legally binding agreement on emissions reduction fading as inconclusive meeting follows inconclusive meeting, the EJF report details the growing economic and humanitarian costs of climate change which it says is the cause of the deaths of over 300,000 people and economic losses of US$125 billion annually. Furthermore, an estimated 500 – 600 million people, around 10% of the planet’s human population are, it says, at extreme risk from the adverse effects of climate change.

Local is more effective, say disaster relief experts

Briefly, the story says that local people respond quicker than aid agencies, who have to do the following before they can begin to provide assistance:

• Carry out an assessment of needs
• Get visas for staff and arrange their travel
• Arrange exemptions from import duties on relief supplies (or pay the extra)

There are some good suggestions on how things could be done better, plus some interesting comments at the end from other contributors.  Well worth a few minutes of your time!

When Advance Aid was in Nairobi at the end of September the grass almost everywhere was brown and the Masai were bringing their cattle into the centre of the city in search of grass verges that might have been watered that the painfully thin cattle could feed on.

Now there are floods as the country goes, almost overnight, from too little to too much water.  The same story is being repeated in Somalia, on the border with Kenya, where 15,000 people in the town of El-Waq are reported to have been displaced by floods.

And today Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London, is arguing that Africa is already warming faster than the global average and that people living there can expect more intense droughts, floods and storm surges.

His Discussion Paper No 1 published by Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change suggests that:
• The drier subtropical regions will warm more than the moister tropics.
• Northern and southern Africa will become much hotter (as much as
4 °C or more) and drier (precipitation falling by 15% or more).
• Wheat production in the north and maize production in the south
are likely to be adversely affected.
• In eastern Africa, including the Horn of Africa, and parts of central
Africa average rainfall is likely to increase.
• Vector borne diseases such as malaria and dengue may spread and
become more severe.
• Sea levels will rise, perhaps by half a metre, in the next fifty years,
with serious consequences in the Nile Delta and certain parts of
West Africa.

The humanitarian consequences of these types of changes are very clear.  And very worrying.

The Reuters report on the signing of The new African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa reported that it is “the first legal instrument of its kind in the world. It defines the obligations that states, and even armed groups, have to protect and assist their own uprooted citizens.”

Forty-six African nations unanimously adopted the landmark convention while 17 heads of state and government, and foreign ministers signed it, including the presidents of Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Somalia, and the prime ministers and vice presidents of Burundi, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and Rwanda.

However, before it can come into effect the convention will need to be ratified by a minimum of 15 countries.  And there have to be question marks over the capacity of African governments to enforce the Convention, even once it is ratified, let alone police the application of its provisions by the many armed groups that are active within the continent.

The AU reported in the course of the meeting last week that the continent had more than 11 million IDPs, a much higher number than that reported by the UNHCR.

Let us hope that this Convention is ratified rapidly not just by the minimum 15 countries but by all 46 signatories and that it then works on the ground to protect some of the most vulnerable people in Africa.

Studying and understanding the ways that we manage common assets – rivers, the sea, the air around us – has been a large part of the life work of Elinor Ostrom who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.

There are also a wide range of demands that are put on rivers.  These are common assets, but if everyone uses this asset for their own needs without concern for other users, then the wider community that depends on the river can suffer.  This is the famous Tragedy of the Commons first described by Garrett Hardin back in 1968.

Rivers also – especially as far as Advance Aid’s work is concerned, the Zambezi in Southern Africa – have a tendency to flood and this can lead to massive displacement of people and large-scale homelessness.

Today the problems facing the Zambezi and the people who live along it has been described in this interesting article.  All of this may seem a long way from our usual topics of Emergency Relief materials and non-food items, but river basin management is a crucial part of development in many countries and, when it is done well, it can also play a large part in ensuring that avoidable emergencies are indeed avoided.

Elinor Ostrom’s work has played a major part in our understanding of these issues and she deserves the thanks and applause of the development community today.

For example, Sudan has an estimated 4-5 million IDPs, thanks to the recent civil war in the south, and violence in Darfur and the east.

And at the peak of Uganda’s northern conflict, at least 1.8 million people were displaced, although most have now returned home.  But there are still nearly 500,000 displaced people there, down from 710,000 earlier in the year.

Other highlights (if you can call them that) of this report:
•    1.3 million displaced by violence in Somalia
•    2 million displaced in the Eastern DRC by the violence and civil war there
•    100,000 displaced in the Central African Republic
•    168,000 displaced in Chad

Overall, it’s a terrifying number and, as the report points out, IDPs do not have the same rights as refugees (who have crossed international boundaries) and this makes their situation worse and the problem much harder for aid and UN agencies to deal with.

Here, for example, is Hans Rosling from 2006.  He has the most extraordinary way of presenting statistics that show the way that the world has developed over the past forty years.

Of most relevance and importance to us at Advance Aid is the clear correlation that is shown between wealth generation and reduced infant mortality, wealth generation and improved health.

Note throughout his presentation how sub-Saharan Africa is lagging behind the rest of the world.  And note also how Asian countries have succeeded over this forty year period in pulling themselves up and lifting hundreds of millions of their people out of poverty.

His use of statistics is impressive, his presentation of these statistics is simply breathtaking.  And it reinforces our belief that the way forward for Africa is to ensure that jobs are created there and, through jobs, that the continent becomes richer, something that aid on its own has signally failed to deliver.

A word or two about TED – the site says about itself that “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds:  Technology, Entertainment, Design.  Since then its scope has become ever broader.  Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.”

TED is a global treasure, so go enjoy it and learn as you go!

Now the UN is to revise its appeal made on 7th October.  Initially it called for $74m, but now it says that this “was clearly not enough” and the UN is stressing that this number would be revised upwards when more detailed reports come in from the field.

Amongst the problems the UN – and the Philippines – is facing are the double impact of the global financial crisis and the number of emergencies to hit South East Asia over the past few weeks – tsunamis in Samoa, the earthquake in Indonesia and flooding in several countries in the region.

John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said he was optimistic the international donor community would respond positively to a revised appeal, and added, “Climate change is already causing more intense disasters.”

Cyclone Ketsana dumped record rainfall on Manila and surrounding areas on 26th September, causing unprecedented flooding. It destroyed hospitals and homes, and washed away entire communities along river banks.

A week later on 3rd October, super-typhoon Parma hit the northern Philippines and Luzon island’s western coast, drowning large tracts of farm land and causing landslides that destroyed bridges and motorways.

Authorities were also forced to release water from two near-bursting dams, adding to the flooding that at one point covered an entire province.

Damage to infrastructure and agriculture, which contributes significantly to the economy, is initially placed at 17.6 billion pesos ($382.60 million), a figure that is likely to rise once a final assessment is made, officials said.