|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1188-iv House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO NATURAL DISASTERS
Thursday 6 July 2006 MR JOHN SCICCHITANO and DR JOHN TWIGG Evidence heard in Public Questions 189 - 236
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Thursday 6 July 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Battle Richard Burden Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock ________________
Witnesses: Mr John Scicchitano, Regional Adviser for West and North Africa, USAID, Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, and Dr John Twigg, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University College, London, gave evidence. Q189 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen, and thank you very much for agreeing to come and give evidence to the Committee from your area of special expertise. As you know, the Committee is looking into response to disasters and this particular section you have some expertise on how we might prevent or mitigate disasters which is obviously something that is very relevant to us. We visited the earthquake region in Pakistan the week before last to get some kind of feel for one of the more recent disasters and responses. I think certainly we gleaned something from that. It may or may not feature in what we have to say. It certainly will in our report. Did you both participate in Kobe? You will obviously be aware of that conference and I have ascertained before the meeting that Hyogo is a local prefecture of Japan. Since that strategy or framework for action was launched in January last year, what do you think has been the progress on disaster reduction in terms of either government or international agencies? Do you feel that has taken things forward in the last 18 months? Dr Twigg: There is always a long lead in time between one of these big, international events and starting to see results. It is quite easy to be cynical about these big UN conferences and what they represent in terms of milestones. We have come quite a long way at Kobe. It was not obvious at the time; it is becoming a bit more obvious now. There is a much firmer commitment to reducing losses from disasters which was not there before. We talked before, at previous UN conferences, the IDNDR[1] and the Yokahama conference in 1994, much more in terms of the general direction we wanted to go in but nobody wanted to be too tied down. People are feeling now that they are more tied down to specifics and they have to deliver something. How you get to reducing losses is a different question. What has been obvious at the international end is that ISDR[2] and other international agencies are now looking very seriously at the mechanisms you use for main streaming disaster risk reduction into development programming across the board. We all knew we had to do it. The interesting question now is how we get there. Q190 Chairman: Does that mean that governments now understand that, far from being just another cost they have to meet, it is an investment which they should incorporate into the programmes and ultimately it will cost them more not to do it? Dr Twigg: I cannot speak for the 168 governments who signed up. One would assume so because that is clearly implicit in the documentation that came out. The challenge for them though is knowing how to get there and what kind of tools they can use to do so. There is a lot of very good project level experience of disaster reduction work. We are still not quite so clear about what it looks like at a national level when you put all the pieces of the jigsaw in place and how that would map out. The ISDR is very active at the moment in trying to give guidance on how states should go forward with that, the kind of indicators they should be looking for, the kind of milestones and bench marks of programming. Mr Scicchitano: I come from a different background, more in disaster response than disaster risk reduction. Part of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in the USA's mandate is of course reducing the risks of disasters but frankly it is much more difficult to make such investments because one is always fighting fires and so preventing the fires becomes much more difficult. Your question about governments' willingness to invest in those efforts to prepare is much less developed in West Africa, let us say, where I am based, than I would be in the Caribbean where governments have come much further in preparing and responding to more predictable disasters. Q191 Chairman: The United Nations had their International Strategy for Disaster Reduction which I understand is really to try and encourage governments to make that preparation. Does it provide enough leadership and stimulus to make that happen? As a passing comment, those of us who did go to Pakistan were very impressed that the fear of deaths after the event did not materialise on the scale that people were concerned about, which suggested that something had been learned and action was taken. In comment, we have to say having a strong military government gives you a capacity that not every country has or would even wish to have but it played a very important role. Nevertheless, the question is if the United Nations have this strategy which is basically saying you should prepare; you should work out in advance how you think about disasters and reduce them, what is the process by which they can make it happen? Do you think there is that kind of leadership? Dr Twigg: It is often difficult to see what happens behind the scenes. If there is dialogue between ISDR and national governments, it is probably invisible until after the event. ISDR itself seems to be very active. What kind of impact that is having in stimulating governments and driving them forward I think it is a bit too soon to say. You could work backwards and say that the outcome of the Kobe conference was clearly the instigation of ISDR and other people who were pushing for change. You also have to see it within the context of the whole UN system, the UNDP, which now has the mandate offensive for implementing a lot of disaster reduction work through the UN system. It is giving a lot of capacity and building support to governments through other programmes. ISDR is only one part of the bigger picture. Q192 Chairman: We were told in no uncertain terms by the Norwegian Refugee Council that at the very beginning the UN responses to the Pakistan earthquake were too slow and too uncoordinated. They were very complimentary about the relationship with DFID. They said if it had not been for the leadership given by DFID more people would have died. The UN agencies just were not there. They were not organised. They did not send the right people. At the end the UN was very important and obviously they did get their act together but right at the beginning they did not. That is not disaster prevention but it is certainly risk reduction. It kind of does imply that there is a way to go within the UN if it is going to deliver. I do not know whether you have a comment to make on that? Mr Scicchitano: From the African context, being based in the field, we have done a bit better as international actors including the UN on disaster preparedness than on disaster risk reduction. Although since Kobe there have been a few conferences, the same applies to the UN as to the governments. It is difficult to make those investments. In the preparedness sector, there is much more work to be done but I think there have been some efforts on preparing coordination ahead of time before the disaster. If you take the example of the crisis in the Ivory Coast, there has been significant preparation of contingency plans in neighbouring countries such that, should the crisis explode and a large number of refugees are displaced, the international community under the lead of the UN is prepared for such an influx. Again, I think that is a fairly small part of what we are doing overall in the African context because the disasters that are under way take so much more of our time and energy. Q193 John Battle: I wonder if I could ask you about your view of DFID's efforts in respect to disaster and reducing the risks. You may know they published a paper in March this year, "Reducing the Risk of Disasters - Helping to Achieve Sustainable Poverty Reduction in a Vulnerable World." It was a new disaster risk reduction policy statement. Do you think it represents any significant progress for the department? In the light of that paper, what changes do you think operationally DFID should make in this area? Dr Twigg: I think it does represent a step forward. If you look back at previous government statements - for instance, the 1997 White Paper - they have all recognised the importance of this issue in a line here or there but have not really set out a coherent approach to dealing with it. This is the first document I have seen that has come out of DFID since 1997 that has really addressed this. I am not aware of similar documents being produced by other bilateral donors that have really grappled with it in quite the same way. In that sense, I think it is a big step forward. It does demonstrate a pretty good understanding of the issues as well. DFID has commissioned its own research in the past anyway. There was a scoping study two years ago. UNDP produced a report more recently. There was a lot of material that came through the Kobe process so it is well informed. In terms of where they need to go, there is one crucial area that was identified in the National Audit Office report in 2003. If you want to see it main streamed within the organisation as a whole in the way it works, you have to take it beyond the policy level. Policies look fine. It is very easy to write a good policy. It is much harder to get it implemented. We saw this with the 1997 White Paper. It highlighted disaster reduction but that was never reflected in action on the ground within DFID because there was not any senior management buy in. You have to see it, first of all, incorporated into country planning, country action plans or whatever they call them now. It has to be part of that process. The evidence so far in the National Audit Office report and in work that was done previously shows that it is not yet being considered. It also needs to be considered in project planning processes. What are your normal procedures for designing, implementing and evaluating projects? It is not there yet. It is getting through a little bit in environmental routes and what have you but again it is not systematised. DFID needs to have the capacity to implement this across the organisation. When Tearfund did a study of institutional donors and their involvement with disaster reduction three years ago, it found that at that stage DFID had one full time and four part time people working in disaster reduction in an organisation with a staff of 2,700. They were expected to deal with policy work, with funding proposals, with everything. You need more of a push to make that go forward. It means you need a much larger group of staff throughout the organisation who understand what this is about, not just in the level of principle but in terms of how you tackle it. Then you have the skills to start doing something about it. It is a long haul. The first step is a very important one that they have taken. I think they recognise within that paper that they need to map out a clear strategy with some milestones. I think that is what they need to do next. Q194 Chairman: Feel free to comment on DFID or whether or not you think your own agency has any similar approach. Mr Scicchitano: I do not have good visibility on DFID's efforts in that area. I know USAID does engage in efforts at risk reduction. I prefer to talk about the specific, hands on, practical experience that we have in the field. If you take the West African context, although it is a fairly small percentage of our overall efforts, there are specific activities, one of which is coming up next month. We are organising the US Government's own mission disaster preparedness. We have officers in each country within the region and they are prepared by ourselves within the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance to be better prepared to coordinate and to respond to a disaster. Another example is funding that we provide to NGOs - Concern is one example where we have funded - to work at community level in communities that are vulnerable to risks, to be better prepared to respond should a crisis occur. Q195 Joan Ruddock: In that widest planning process, looking forward some time, to what extent are you drawing on climate change predictions? Mr Scicchitano: That is really not a field that I can respond to. Q196 Joan Ruddock: In that it is widely acknowledged now that climate change will bring in its wake particularly in Africa. Mr Scicchitano: I prefer not to get out of my field of expertise. I am a disaster response specialist and this is an issue that I do not have particular expertise in. Q197 Mr Hunt: Could I ask you both about early warning systems because after the tsunami there was a lot of discussion about how vital it is to have proper early warning systems. Then we had the famine in the Horn of Africa and the ODI did a report that indicated that we had all the early warning systems in place then. We could see this one coming and yet still nothing was done until the disaster got to an acute stage. Is this really about the adequacy of early warning systems or is there a rather grim reality that, even if we have early warning systems in place, it is not until a disaster gets large enough to hit the media that we are going to see politicians in the rich world mobilise to respond adequately? Mr Scicchitano: Let me talk about FEWSNETT. FEWSNET is a project supported by USAID and it has been in existence for some time. It is our primary famine early warning system. Family early warning system network is what FEWSNET stands for. Gary Eilerts, who is the USAID responsible party for FEWSNET, was originally invited and I am here on his behalf. He has asked me to represent USAID because he could not make it. FEWSNET is an extremely important tool for USAID in our ability to obtain early warning and for the decision makers to prepare for responses to disasters. It is not without weakness of course and, again going for the specific example of West Africa and the Niger crisis, some of the weaknesses came out. They were discussed quite frankly during a meeting that ODI conducted in November 2005, I believe. One of the weaknesses is that the early warning systems in the case of West Africa were not looking enough at the impact of markets in neighbouring countries. We were focusing more on the availability of food within a country but not looking at the impact on neighbouring countries. Another weakness was that nutritional indicators were not taken enough into consideration. On the other hand, FEWSNET did an excellent job of providing good context. In my written evidence I talked about the context of the Sahelian crisis and FEWSNET was, I believe, influential not just for USAID but for the entire humanitarian community in providing good context on what was the nature of the crisis there. There is something that early warning cannot do well. Early warning is not well placed to sound alarm bells on situations that have been in existence for a long time. That is one of the things that was said about the Sahel crisis concerning nutrition, that those rates of malnutrition, number one, were not just due to lack of food and, number two, were consistently elevated in the last decade or more. In the case of the Sahel, I believe there are parallels that have been drawn to the East Africa food security crisis. Perhaps we have asked early warning systems to do what they are not really there to do. In other words, advocate for responses to development situations or long term structural situations that have been there for a long time. Dr Twigg: Can I talk about it from the point of view of rapid impact disasters because I think it is quite a different case from a famine evolving over several months. There will be a lot of information coming through an early warning system to inform decisions that are made. In the case of a rapid impact disaster like a flood, a hurricane or an earthquake the problems are far less in the technical merits of a warning system which by and large tend to be quite good - hurricane forecasting is terrific, for example - than in the decision making that comes at the end of it. New Orleans did not suffer from a lack of early warning. It suffered from a lack of effective readiness to deal with that situation when it arose. That is the crucial point. In a sudden impact disaster you are looking at something different. You are looking at how sometimes rapid decisions are being made but more often than not about how well prepared people are to use that warning when it comes. What you find when you study early warnings generally is that the system works very well at the forecasting end where the scientific knowledge comes into play and it gets progressively weaker the closer it gets to the communities who are going to be affected who (a) may not receive the warnings; (b) if they do receive them may not get them in a form they understand because nobody has thought about how to transmit them best; and (c) do not either know what to do when they receive the warnings or have nowhere to go and protect themselves. There is no point getting a cyclone warning if you cannot go to a cyclone shelter. You cannot run fast enough probably. Those are where the problems come in the system. They are much more at that sharp end where it affects communities. Q198 Mr Hunt: Is that something that is only a role for the governments in those countries or is that something that the international community can facilitate? Dr Twigg: I do not think it is either/or. Local level agencies have a role as well. Some of the most effective hurricane and flood early warning systems are based at community level. There is some message transmission down but most of the action, most of the decision making about local circumstances and the need to act, when to act and what to do, is local. A good system integrates all of that. Q199 Mr Hunt: The way the early warning system is set up is flawed because the news does not reach down far enough. That is really what you are saying? Dr Twigg: Yes. I was at the UN early warning conference in Bonn a couple of months ago, which is the third international conference they have had on that. People emphasised again and again it is the last mile where things go wrong. It is not at the international level where meteorological information is being shared; it is often not at the national level where that information is being fed down to local government. It is right with the communities on the ground. Q200 Ann McKechin: In USAID's written evidence to this inquiry you said that for slow onset natural disasters a hurried humanitarian response can be counterproductive. When we were in Pakistan, people had been returned back to their villages but were now being evacuated for the second time because the monsoon season was about to hit. There was a risk of landslides as aftershocks were still occurring as a secondary risk. They had been returned back before the secondary risk had been evaluated. I wondered what both of you believe needs to be done to ensure that humanitarian actors take sufficient account of those longer term development contexts in their work. Is it realistic to attempt to integrate long term risk reduction into the recovery phase of a disaster? Mr Scicchitano: You refer to my written evidence and the case of the Sahel. In that case, the humanitarian actors were not well informed about the context of the development concerns. We, as humanitarian actors, can do much better, number one, to listen more closely to the development actors on the ground because the natural response of humanitarian actors is that we are good at moving quickly, moving resources, moving people and responding quickly to save lives. That is extremely important but particularly for slow onset disasters it is a bit different than the distinction made here between natural and manmade disasters. It is a distinction between slow onset disasters and rapid onset disasters. Particularly for the case of slow onset disasters humanitarian actors do need to pay more attention to the concerns and the efforts of the development actors. They do also need, particularly in stable situations, to pay more attention to what the government is saying and work to strengthen government services and government ministries. That is something that was one of the early weaknesses of the Sahel response, as I described in my paper. Since then I believe humanitarian actors have come to learn those lessons and are now responding more carefully, but we need to assure that that happens in the future as well. Q201 Ann McKechin: They need to consider the individual circumstances of a particular area rather than a one size fits all approach? Mr Scicchitano: Exactly, particularly for slow onset disasters, to resist ---- Q202 Ann McKechin: Just running in with the food aid? Mr Scicchitano: Exactly. Dr Twigg: I think it is a really important question. It is something we perhaps do not understand quite as well as we should. It is partly to do with sequencing. Humanitarian actors come in; they do their job for three, six or nine months or whatever it is and then they pack up and go home because that is when the money has run out anyway and it is left somehow to the development people to pick up the pieces and take it forward. That idea of disaster sequencing is quite dangerous, as John said. You need much closer integration much earlier in the process because ultimately it is going to be development agencies that take the risk reduction process forward in the long term because they will be there for the long term. This is not an area I am expert in. I know you have David Peppiatt speaking next and ProVention has done quite a lot of work on disaster recovery. It is something we need to pay very careful attention to in understanding those processes by which people start to recover from disasters but also to become more resilient to future ones. It is not something that is terribly well understood at the moment and it is very long term. Q203 Richard Burden: Could we talk about the role of the media? We have already referred briefly to it in one of our earlier evidence sessions. We had quite a long session with the BBC on how the way the media respond to disasters can not only affect materially what comes in but how far things move up or down priorities and, in a sense, the nature of response. There have been various comments already about Niger and the reality was not quite the same as maybe some of the media portrayals. In your view, how do you think humanitarian actors and development actors engage with the media at the moment and how could that engagement be improved or changes to be able to engage with the more effective response, particularly in slow onset disasters? Mr Scicchitano: I did also mention the media role in my written evidence. Of course the media plays an extremely important role because the public plays such an important role in our responses to disasters. As governmental agencies, the public is at the base of what we are doing. We know also that the public more directly provides funding to NGOs and other actors. Their awareness and understanding is extremely important. In the case of the Sahel in 2005 the media played the very important role of bringing attention to a situation that many people did not know about. I worked for many years in Burkina Faso and when I would go back to the US most people had never heard of Burkina Faso and did not know whether it was a rock band, a name of a fruit or a name of a country. Of course there were shortcomings in the media's portrayal of the situation and, in the end, it potentially produces a response that is skewed. In the case of the Sahel, as I mentioned in the paper, we saw a response that was skewed, number one, towards Niger whereas it is clear from the evidence that the problem is really a regional, Sahelian problem and not just a problem in Niger. It skewed the response across time because we had a very important short term response in 2005 in Niger. We had over $100 million of food aid in Niger and yet that response is certainly trickling down to a much lower amount; whereas that funding could perhaps have been better used if it was better equilibrated across time. To answer your question how can we be more effective working with the media, I will go back to one of the remarks made in an earlier presentation of evidence where one referred to the case of the Mozambican woman who gave birth in a tree. That is an interesting example because the media talked about that as a human interest story, putting a human face on the situation. There are ways that we can do that better to explain a situation in its context that we had not done well in 2005. In 2005, for example, we did that by showing the starving child with its mother which is a very moving scene but there are other images and stories that can be told that maybe are not as sensational and in some ways may not sell as well as the story of the stick figure child. They are important stories and if we tell them well we can inform the public in a much better way. We can inform our Congress in the US in a much better way and we can have a much more rational allocation of resources. Together as NGOs - I had many experiences working with NGOs before I came to USAID - our relationships as government actors with the media as well as the UN, I think we can do better, telling those stories in ways that match the context more accurately. Dr Twigg: It is really difficult because it seems to me that the media go into every disaster with a prewritten script. You know what they are going to say. It does not matter about the particular location and the circumstances. You know they are going to give the impression that most people are helpless and dependent on outside aid whereas in fact most people in most disasters are helped by friends, family, neighbours, local communities, local services and what have you. You know that they are going to be more interested in the body count than the wider impact on society which led one BBC reporter - I think it was in the 2001 floods in Mozambique - to say there was not a disaster because he had not seen enough dead people. The fact that thousands of livelihoods had been completely trashed by the flooding escaped his notice. That was not what he had gone there to see. You know you are going to get stories about anarchy, chaos and looting. Again, there will always be some in disasters but a lot of research over the years shows that collaboration, cooperation and pulling together produce a much stronger spirit than anarchy and chaos. You know there are going to be stories about disease outbreaks because bodies are not buried in time. The World Health Organisation will tell you that is not a major consideration in most disasters but time and time again you will get the same stories and it is really hard trying to get that through to journalists. The best you can hope for is usually an article a few weeks later on page 16 of The Guardian or something that looks at it a bit more thoughtfully, but that has been negated by the miles and miles of newspaper coverage devoted to other issues. Q204 Richard Burden: Admittedly the people who gave evidence to us were involved in fairly weighty stories a lot of the time but the kind of message they were giving to us was that whilst, yes, their paper has to sell and their TV or radio station has to get the ratings; but certainly they were saying they have to respond to things as they emerge. If they get a phone call at six o'clock in the morning that something has happened in Pakistan, you get on the plane and try to find out what is going on but they were trying to emphasise to us that they were, as people involved in the media, trying to address this issue and do longer term, forgotten crises type programming and so on. Is that really whistling in the wind? Whilst the occasional article or programme may be made, it is still fundamentally changing. Dr Twigg: I think it is BBC2 rather than News at Ten. Q205 Richard Burden: What could they do? Is there anything they could do or you could encourage them to do? Dr Twigg: They need to be a little better informed about the more general issues before they go out there. Part of the problem is that a news journalist who has to cover a disaster is covering all sorts of stories so they do not have the background and understanding. As you say, they are woken up at 6am and they have to take a plane somewhere but they are involved in that extremely chaotic situation around them visibly, which they are trying to make sense of. It is difficult but I think it is a question of how much weight you give to particular elements of a story. If you cannot see for yourself, if you cannot get the big picture, you are getting anecdotal evidence which is masquerading as the whole picture. I am not even sure we can overcome that, to be honest. Q206 Joan Ruddock: We are all aware and agreed on the fact that development agencies tend to play a more significant role in the slow burn disasters than in the sudden on set disasters. Both of you have spoken about the need for humanitarian operations to have more regard to the development pattern. I wonder if you can say what lessons have been learned by the development agencies in slow onset disasters about how to get the development community more involved in disaster management more broadly? Mr Scicchitano: There were a number of lessons learned going into the experience of the Sahel 2005 crisis. Many actors of the humanitarian community and also the development community got together through the invitation of ODI but again it happened later in the Sahel with government actors. One of the points that came out very strongly - this was one of the questions in the guidance - was are we undermining or enhancing resilience for future responses. I am not sure that we have complete agreement but I think many would say that some of the actions in 2005 in the Sahel served to undermine resilience and we do not want to make that mistake again, particularly in the Sahel. We learned some things about nutrition that we did not know before. Another point is that actors who perhaps are not nutritionists or do not have a lot of experience in nutrition but are decision makers learned a lot about nutrition or enough so that the same mistakes would not be made again. In terms of enhancing resilience, one of the things we saw in Niger in 2005 was that there was a neglect of the public health facilities. The public health facilities have heroes who work year and year out in responding to the needs of communities and yet in many ways they were put aside. USAID said, "Move over. We are here now." This is a lesson learned. We need to work through these structures. In this kind of crisis that has been present for a long time, by neglecting them we have really undermined the future response. That is the only example that can be provided in terms of the analysis of information. We set up structures to analyse information but neglected the governmental structures that were there already. In West Africa we had SILS that many of our governments have funded in the past to strengthen the ability of local governments to respond to crises. This is something that we did not work through and with enough in 2005 and we learned that lesson. Development actors were telling humanitarians, "SILS is here. Why are you not working with SILS and humanitarian actors?" In many cases, they were not even aware that that structure was there. Dr Twigg: A lot of development agencies are involved in disaster reduction sometimes without knowing about it. Back in the 1990s I worked for a British development NGO which did a lot of work with poor communities in Sehal and sub-Saharan Africa generally. It was working in Sudan, Kenya and Zimbabwe and other places. They had a very active food security programme with farmers living on arid land, helping them to improve their crop yields in good and bad years. I would have called that vulnerability reduction and disaster prevention or whatever, disaster mitigation. They called it food security, but the goals were the same. The use of language sometimes disguises the fact that we probably have more in common than we think. Q207 Joan Ruddock: That is a point that would be well taken by the Committee because there is long term expertise in issues of food security, particularly in drought and so on. I was very concerned about John Scicchitano's answer to my previous question on climate change and I wonder if I can put that to you because international scientists now give us the strongest impression that all our development aid can be wiped out, all its results can be wiped out, by the potential for climate change to cause disasters in developing countries. I wonder if you have any thoughts on what should be being done by development agencies to take this factor into consideration, because we were talking about the timescale which is well within the planning needs of any development agency. Dr Twigg: You will find most of them talk about. Q208 Joan Ruddock: Indeed and I wonder what they are doing. Dr Twigg: That is the key point. The problem for them is knowing what does this mean from our programme in this country at this time or in ten years' time. The scientists on international climate change are very cagey in terms of making predictions especially at sub-regional level where the evidence can become less certain. They have not in the past looked very closely at the relationship between natural disasters and climate change. That will change with the fourth report that is coming out next year. For an operational agency, I think it is very difficult because they cannot assess what that is going to mean to them, except as a broad issue. It is very difficult for them at the moment to see what the trend is going to be and how much they need to invest in, say, a particularly strategy at a particular time. Mr Scicchitano: Going back to the issue of climate change, although I am not well versed in climate change at a global level, if I change the terminology and talk, for example, about desertification that is something that clearly could be linked to climate change. It is something that development and humanitarian actors have concerns about. If you look at, for example, the agro-pastoral band of the Sahel, it is a band where desertification is occurring and the livelihoods of those agro-pastors who are relying on both agriculture and animal raising for their food security are being affected and, in a way, squeezed down towards the south. That is the population that was heavily affected by the Sahelian crisis, particularly by the locust invasion in 2004. Humanitarian actors certainly were intervening in the locust crisis and again in 2005 but it is important that the humanitarians also look towards what the development actors are doing to assist those same populations. As a specific example, humanitarian agencies were providing restocking to pastors who lost their herds in the 2005 crisis. At the same time, development actors were assisting the same populations to improve animal health. In other words, improving the restocking mechanism in the longer term. Although perhaps in the immediate response as I said earlier, without the context, the reaction of humanitarians is that these people need aid immediately, in the medium term as we began to understand better the context, there were more links between those humanitarians and the longer term efforts, for example, to improve animal health. Q209 Chairman: WaterAid have had a group of people visiting this country this week. We were told in Tamil Nadu that the water table had dropped very heavily because people had no long term plan. They had put in a plan that did not solve the climate problem, although it has rained more recently, but they had been able to use the resource more effectively and more efficiently. That is kind of a development programme. Secondly, we were told in Brazil, when talking about water supplies, they had done an economic analysis that showed that, for every dollar spent on delivering clean water to poor people, you save between $4 and $43 on medical expenditure as well as better survival and mortality rates and so on. There is no point, for example, in giving a child treatment for typhoid if they go straight back to the house where they contracted the typhoid because there was no clean water. If you are looking at disaster relief, I guess it is that cultural, psychological change which says this is not an extra cost; it is a real investment about poverty reduction and long term development. Dr Twigg: I think decision makers are starting to understand that now because there is more and more evidence showing that disaster mitigation or disaster reduction, whatever you want to call it, pays. You can do it in that crude, cost benefit analysis way if you wish to do. There is also a lot of field experience - you talked about replenishing water tables and what have you - from rain water harvesting initiatives in India especially but also in Africa and other places which has been hugely successful at very low cost and they are very easy to maintain. Q210 Mr Hunt: Could I return to this question of slow onset disasters because I think we have been having a very interesting discussion this afternoon. To me it is becoming clear, without sounding frivolous, that our total failure as the international community to be able to address effectively slow onset disasters is itself a slow onset disaster. We have had climate change, for example, this afternoon which is a slow onset disaster. You compare that to the tsunami which raised more money than we were able to spend. Then you have climate change where everyone agrees we are not doing enough. You have AIDS which every year claims eight times as many deaths as the number of people who died in the tsunami, on an ongoing basis. We have completely failed to deal with that slow onset disaster. I want to ask you very controversially: you said that BBC reporter said he was not interested in watching that situation because there were not enough dead bodies. I am sure that was not a reflection of his own personal callousness; he was simply reflecting what television viewers are willing to see. Given that we know that, when there is a rapid onset disaster, it is very easy to mobilise public opinion because of the strength of the TV images, the main focus of development agencies and USAID and DFID, the largest donors, should be on slow onset disasters and we should focus on that area because it is at the moment our area of greatest weakness. Mr Scicchitano: I disagree that we have completely failed to address slow onset disasters. Rather the issue is that our responses are far less visible. They are far less exciting and far less media worthy but they are there, building resilience, working with governments, working in the long term with slow onset disasters requiring in some ways slower responses that produce results over a longer length of time. Again referring to the example of West Africa, there are considerable investments that have been made to reduce the vulnerability of these populations. There have been food security interventions. USAID has invested heavily in food security interventions that increase the productivity of farmers, that allow them to irrigate lands that have not been irrigated before, that allow them access to better seeds, for example. These are interventions that may not be as exciting as a woman giving birth in a tree but they do have impact on the population. By calling them slow onset disasters I think we were perhaps looking for the wrong kind of response and we do not see what is there. In terms of nutrition, there is a particular response that is incredibly effective and it has been proven to be effective. In USAID we call it Child Survival. It addresses the main causes of child mortality of children under five. They are long term programmes. They are investments made again in collaboration with government but they reduce the rates of global acute malnutrition, which is what the crisis was all about in Niger in 2005. You probably would not have seen much about these interventions in the newspapers but they are there and they are effective. We do need to continue supporting them as well as informing the public, going back to the issue about the media, about these kinds of interventions, somehow making them appropriate for public consumption because they are extremely important and we do need greater equilibrium between that short term response and that longer term, slow onset response. Dr Twigg: I would agree with what John says. There is a huge amount of invisible work in food security, famine reduction, that has gone on and that is very important. Policy makers' agendas shift responsibly as much as the media agenda does. At the end of the 1980s the UN set up an international campaign for natural disaster reduction. There was a huge amount of international interest. Five years later it was mostly forgotten because of the Yugoslav crisis, the Great Lakes crisis and so on. Suddenly, complex political emergencies were what everybody was interested in. A few years after that we had Hurricane Mitch, the flooding in Bangladesh and the cyclone in Orissa and natural disaster of a different kind were back on the agenda. Then it was 9/11 and so on. There is always a tendency to see the last major disaster or disasters as the area where you are weakest and you need to focus. There has been a huge amount of interest in tsunamis and tsunami early warning systems and all the rest of it because of what happened at the end of 2005. Q211 Chairman: When was the last one of that scale and when will the next one be? Dr Twigg: You do not know. In geological time it could be hundreds of years. It does come back a bit to planning ahead. We know there will be a very large scale earthquake in a very populated part of Asia in the next 50 years which probably is not very well prepared for. I am not sure people are really geared up to that. It is much easier to gear up to the things that you can deal with in a relatively straightforward way, such as a lot of the drought and famine reduction work, a lot of work on flooding which is what affects most people year in, year out round the world. Some of those bigger issues are rather harder to tackle. Q212 Mr Hunt: Mr Scicchitano, where I am not sure I agree with you is that I am sure there have been some interventions that have been valuable over time and a lot of money has been spent on them, but there are quite specific examples of what USAID does which most people would say are not helping to prevent slow onset disasters, such as the fact that through USAID the World Food Programme gives out a lot of food packages of grain that comes from the United States rather than being grown in Africa which does not therefore foster the independence and the long term food security that is needed in those situations. I am not talking about development because obviously DFID, USAID and development agencies think a lot about development. I am talking about slow onset disasters which I categorise as something very different. Do you not think we need to step up the sophistication with which we look at slow onset disasters and in particular the examples such as the one I gave? Mr Scicchitano: Absolutely. There are many areas in which there is room for improvement in our level of sophistication of understanding, in our level of rationality of response and, I believe, as actors we are all working on that. That is one of the reasons that we are here today. On your specific remark regarding food that USAID provides, USAID provides food and it is careful to analyse the situation to assure that food is needed, is an appropriate response and does not negatively affect farmers and producers in the country where it is being distributed. I agree with you in that we have quite a long way to go in terms of improving our sophistication, improving our level of response, but efforts are under way and I believe drawing greater links between those relief and development efforts is going in the right direction. Q213 Chairman: The Committee did have the opportunity to meet your colleagues when we were in Washington last year. A point has been made, but I think we have had that discussion and we will no doubt continue to have it now that we are back, and so I appreciate that. Can I thank both of you. I think it has been a helpful and somewhat encouraging discussion, which does suggest that some things are beginning to come out. We very much appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to come and give evidence. Thank you. Witness: Mr David Peppiatt, Head, ProVention Consortium Secretariat, gave evidence. Q214 Chairman: Thank you, Mr Peppiatt. You will have heard our earlier discussion. It almost takes off, I think, where you come in, as it were. One of the obvious things, and, perhaps, part of the reason why we are doing this inquiry, is that we have had over the last 12 months a lot of what might be called high-impact low-frequency disasters. Obviously two concerns arise out of that. One is that they attract a lot of attention and, two, that the resources, not that they are not justified, but they might divert us away from other kinds of things. I am sorry; I was just having an exchange on the side here with my clerk about describing the opposite of that which is low-impact high-frequency. I was questioning the term "low-impact", because the argument is low-impact in terms of public perception and media and not in terms of consequences. We are talking about malnutrition in Ethiopia or the AIDS crisis, which is carrying off hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people on a continuing basis, as opposed to one big bang which wipes out a lot of people overnight and therefore creates a lot more attention. To what extent do you think our response to those high-impact events actually distorts the attention we could or should be giving to risk reduction? Mr Peppiatt: I think it does, most definitely. We are very drawn to the big ones; so policy and debate get shaped by 2005 and the quotes relate to the Tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake and hurricane Katrina, not the other numerous so-called low-impact events. I think the problem is that while 2005 was very good, because it raised a lot of international interest and concern for natural disasters, it does rather skew the picture if we shape international policy on these huge events and do not recognise that, day in day out, as we have just been discussing, there are so-called low impact or residual disasters that wear away people's livelihoods. It is interesting when you look at some of the studies that have come out, the much more longitudinal studies coming particularly from Latin America, that the accumulation of ten years of local disasters, these low-impact but high-frequency events, have a greater impact on the poor than a one-off big one, and I think it is very important to get that perspective right, particularly after this extraordinary Tsunami phenomenon which should not shape the way we now perceive disaster risk reduction. Q215 Chairman: I am going to come to that, but it occurs to me that we have only two ministers in our Department for International Development, both extremely good, very active ministers, but it has been pointed out by their own civil servants that they spend a disproportionate amount of their time dealing with these high profile things rather than directing a long-term strategy. That is not a criticism of them. It has inevitably been, because they are in the public eye, what they are required to do. By definition, when you have only got two ministers, the more time they are spending on that, the less time they are spending on the delivery of the fundamental objectives. The point I want to ask you now is, given that all this high profile stuff happens, how do we get back on track or keep on track the idea that, yes, we have got to deal with those, but in the meantime, if anything, let us increase our attention on actually ensuring that we have effective action and effective prevention wherever we can? Mr Peppiatt: I think it goes to the heart of the matter that disaster risk reduction has to become an every-day part of the development business and development planning. It is interesting that this particular inquiry is obviously looking at the humanitarian response side, and this subject of disaster risk reduction has fallen rather awkwardly for many years between humanitarian action and development; and often our humanitarian friends will say, "Well, disaster risk reduction is about addressing the root causes of vulnerability" - many of them very long-term structural mitigation issues we have been discussing this afternoon - "that is not called humanitarian business. We are here to save lives", and our development friends will say, "Well, it has got that word 'disaster' in there. It is very much for the humanitarian folk to deal with", and, as a result, over many years, disaster risk reduction in terms of policies, in terms of institutional structures has fallen in the gaps. I think things are changing as a result, as we discussed, with a new international strategy, the Hyogo Framework, and a little bit more political attention, but it still sits awkwardly, and when you talk to development parts of DFID, I doubt that many of them were aware of the new disaster risk reduction policy that was launched in March. I know there is a great effort underway, and when you go down to the country offices and you talk to development organisations not many will have had of the Hyogo Framework, so we have still got a long way to go to make disaster risk reduction a reality and accessible for development language, but at the end of the day it is about integrating risk and vulnerability reduction into the way we plan development. Chairman: I do not want to pre-empt it, but this Committee has decided we are going to have an inquiry into water, and I would like to think some of that is about recognising that actually delivering clean water will prevent an awful lot of disasters and there is an integrated approach to that. Q216 Joan Ruddock: I think you may have begun to answer the question I was going to put to you, which is what can be done to ensure that development policies, projects and programmes do not unwittingly create new forms of vulnerability to natural hazards. One of the things that was said to my colleagues (I was not there) in Pakistan was that many school children's lives might have been saved after the Pakistan earthquake had it not been for the fact that their schools had been built on probably the worse bits of land that the village could offer up. They might have been on steep hills or uneven terrains, places where the schools are very vulnerable, and that is a Government development strategy, but I think it goes across the board. How can we try to ensure that, whatever development programmes are being put in place, they do not create that kind of situation, the vulnerability to some other external force? Mr Peppiatt: I think it starts with, as you indicate, integrating concerns of risk and vulnerability right from the outset of development planning. Poverty reduction strategies play a key role in the international development system. Donors such as DFID, the World Bank, support long-term development in developing countries. The World Bank recently assessed 59 of the PRSPs to date and only nine of those paid any attention to hazard risk management and of those nine only three were high-risk disaster-prone countries. The reality is that the international development system, particularly the development finance system, has not done very well to date to integrate concerns of disaster into poverty reduction strategies. I know that this is a particular priority of concern for DFID in its partnership with the World Bank to address that very problem, but there is a need. It may seem yet another issue to mainstream, like climate, like gender, like environment, but when we plan in ministries of education to build critical infrastructure - schools - schools should be resilient as a public building that are safe for school children. It is totally unacceptable that at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning 18,000 children should be killed at school, just as across the Caribbean it is unacceptable that hospitals and health facilities are built that are not resilient to hurricanes. They are very small steps that are taken and the additional cost is not so great, but it needs to be factored in from the outset from poverty reduction strategies to country programmes, even to Ministry of Education and planning and so forth. In that sense it has got to become a development reality and not just a humanitarian concern. Q217 Joan Ruddock: When I was in Zambia I was constantly being taken to see schools with their roofs blown off, and this was a regular feature and they would be waiting ages for the provision for the roof to be put back on, knowing that at some stage it would be blown back off. Mr Peppiatt: The World Bank approved a loan to Mozambique in the late 1990s for a schools project to build 480 secondary schools. In 2000, 500 schools were destroyed. That is a devastating example. Q218 Joan Ruddock: By? Mr Peppiatt: By the floods, disasters eroding in a matter of hours a huge development investment. Q219 Joan Ruddock: May I ask finally, do you have any more concrete ideas than our previous witnesses had about how climate change needs to be built into such strategies? Mr Peppiatt: I do not feel I have more encouraging examples than the previous speakers. I think that there is a tremendous commitment within the climate change community to link and harmonise efforts with the disaster risk reduction world, but the real challenge, when it comes down to it, is what does this mean for organisations? I sit with the programme that I work on within the Red Cross, and colleagues in the Red Cross have said to me, "We are forever having to import new paradigms that are so huge. What does climate adaptation mean for us in the Red Cross at a very local level with limited human resources, limited financial resources? How do we do adaptation?" I think it is much more looking at what we do and what is the impact of climate change on this? Many communities, in the case of the Red Cross, are very active in addressing local risks and vulnerabilities which probably are trying to adapt to the changes caused by climate, but I think one thing globally and at an international level that we need to do, now there is tremendous political commitment to the climate change agenda and there is also this parallel momentum on disaster risk reduction, I think we need to find ways to harmonise them, because there is a great cross-over. Two-thirds of the natural disasters we are addressing are climate related. Q220 Joan Ruddock: Whereas those may be more difficult for climate change scientists to predict, they do say that there will be increasing frequency and increasing problems with such conditions, but things like rising sea levels are not in dispute? Mr Peppiatt: Yes. Q221 Joan Ruddock: So where you build on coasts is obviously an issue, and it seems to me not to have that built into the thinking now, when we know about it, really is some dereliction of duty? Mr Peppiatt: This is being addressed, particularly in the context of small island developing states. I know in the context of the Pacific that there is a real effort to integrate NAP, climate adaptation international development planning, and there are real efforts by a number of small island developing states in the Pacific and the Caribbean very much on land-use planning, on coastal planning, and so there are efforts underway. I just hope we do not have a growing community of climate change funds and climate adaptation NGOs and policies and the same on disaster reduction. Joan Ruddock: Precisely. Q222 Ann McKechin: You have criticised the PRSP strategies for failing to automatically incorporate disaster risk reduction. To what extent is the World Bank seized of the problem? Do they recognise it is a problem, is it something which they are trying to tackle, or is DFID just a lone voice at the moment saying, "You need to do something"? Mr Peppiatt: The World Bank certainly recognises the problem and is even benefiting from a little bit of DFID support to address that problem, and I think generally within the IFIs, the development banks, there is a recognition that development financing needs to really tackle disaster risk, hazard risk management. Where I see a real concern and, if you like, a dilemma - I think that this is a critical issue - is that the relief reconstruction and recovery industry is a booming, bustling business with more actors, not just the DFIDs and the NGOs and the humanitarian sector but the private sector, the military, and, as a result, I believe we are creating perverse incentives for many developing countries towards relief and reconstruction. I would perhaps challenge the view of the previous speakers. I think many of the poorest high risk countries do not have sufficient financial economic political incentives to invest in mitigation. The proof is that they do not borrow for it. If it was a priority, they would borrow money for it, but they do not. They do not invest in it. They do not see there are sufficient incentives. Q223 Ann McKechin: And they do not really tend to insure their properties anyway, because otherwise the insurance market would insist. Mr Peppiatt: I believe the international development system, particularly development banks, have a responsibility to provide more upfront financial incentives, whether that is better rates of development assistance, rewards for investment in mitigation, and so forth, just as there are incentives for insurance, and I think we need to look at a way, because at end of the day a poor country that is having to make tough development choices, long-term mitigation and prevention is seen as an unaffordable luxury. Q224 Chairman: I do not dissent from what you are saying, but it is true, is it not, that not all prevention mitigation costs money, so there would be some value in advising countries on things that are either low-cost or no cost. In Pakistan, clearly rebuilding with steel reinforcement in buildings costs money and is more expensive. Using lighter weight materials or changing a flat roof to a pitched roof does not necessarily cost any more money. Is there not some useful role in providing that kind of advice? If I take the Tsunami or floods or whatever it maybe, saying, "Why do not you not build a little higher up and do your farming and your fishing at that level but do not live there", or whatever. Those do not cost money. Mr Peppiatt: Yes, and we need to provide more incentives like that. We also need to recognise, and I think it came about from some of the points in our earlier discussion, that a real challenge is that a lot of disaster risk reduction, the problem is it is a series of non events, it is not the high profile, high visible television capturing projects that will reward politicians, it is the long-term investment into reducing risk, and often that is very invisible, but we need to find, as a result, other incentives for politicians to really invest and take that responsibility for the safety of their own population. Q225 John Battle: I really want to follow up this thing about how to build in the whole business of investment in risk reduction. I am minded to reflect on the fact that in my constituency there is a prison; in real terms it is more expensive than the five-star hotel in the middle of the city per week for the people that are in there and I wonder whether we will ever get politicians, the process of political institutions, to invest in crime prevention, not as we usually use that term but investing in people to make sure they never end up in prison in the first place. Thereby, in the long-term, we would save money. Applying that analogy to risk reduction, if it is seen as a cost and not as an investment to get engaged in the whole business in anticipation to front-end load the money for the long-term, without it being spectacularly unpopular, how can you incentivise governments, political economic incentives, if you like? Do see any way through that to gear up the systems? Mr Peppiatt: I think it goes back to what we were discussing earlier. We need to perhaps rethink, re-jig the way we do development to ensure that the proactive management of risk is factored into development, and we have to shift from reactive response in the way we deal with disasters to much more proactive prevention, and in that sense moving it away from the sort of disaster event to really factoring into development planning, into coastal planning, where people live, the way we manage natural resources. These are very much standard development practice, and I think you have to shift it away from the sort of disaster event which makes us more reactive in post. Q226 John Battle: Again, it is perhaps a rather anecdotal example, but there was a meeting in my constituency a few weeks ago of older people at which 60, 70 people, mainly over 75, were most worried about knives, because that was the headlines. I asked at that meeting, "Has anybody got any evidence? Has anybody ever been stabbed in this neighbourhood in the last ten years?" Nobody knew of anybody that had been stabbed. A person at the meeting, a gentleman - there were only five gentlemen but many older ladies - said, "No, you are absolutely right. We have to get real about risk assessment and realise", and he turned to a whole group of older women and said, "You must understand that you have got a bigger risk of getting HIV Aids round here than you have of ever being stabbed with a knife!" I simply say to you that our assessment of risk so is far out, so skewed, do we ever get to the basics, and have you any evidence where development is starting to shift the agenda, can you give me any examples at all, to move the agenda on? Mr Peppiatt: No, there are. You talk about risk assessment. I think there is a greatly improved practice in assessing and identifying risk. Most disasters are foreseeable, and that is a very important fact, and if disasters are foreseeable, and most risks globally are concentrated in particular parts of the world, for high-risk we are talking about high-risk, but also in terms of slow-onset, we know where many slow-onset disasters are occurring and will occur. If it is a fact, that disasters are foreseeable, they can be calculated for and factored into development. Going back to your point, there are countries that have acted on that. We can cite Bangladesh as an example of a country that has been very proactive over the last 25 years to really look at the way that development is planned and that risks are managed, even within impossible situations, with 30 million people living on the coastal belts in high-risk areas that will be flooded year in year out, but still taking proactive strategies to minimise the losses and protect the livelihoods within that situation. I also think, in your example, having a much better understanding and awareness of risk is a very important one. I think the practice of assessing and analysing risk is very well applied in the business sector, and I think we need to really improve the way we identify, analyse risk and then, if you like, take a much more prognosis approach to dealing with disasters rather than waiting always for the impact and then diagnosing the malnutrition or the damaged school. We need to have a much more prognosis way in the way we deal with assessing risk. Q227 John Battle: Where in Bangladesh is it getting bedded into the system? Is it among popular participants' groups, people's groups on the coastline, is it in the structures of the bureaucracy, and I do not mean that pejoratively, is it in the institutions of government, local and national, is it in the minds of politicians and the leaders of departments and ministers? Where is it bedded in? Mr Peppiatt: I think the two signs of encouragement are particularly the coordination between line ministries, and this area of disaster risk reduction is not just the responsibility of the Disaster Management Authorities or the Ministry of Planning, it is very much across department. I know that UNDP and DFID and a number of other international development actors are very much focused on trying to improve that coordination between line ministries. Then civil society is particularly strong at working at the local level. Where there is a gap is in the middle at local government and provincial state level, and I think across the board on many of these countries that is where we have not really made much impact and that is where so many of the decisions are made, within municipalities of major cities, within local governments, and there is a big challenge there. Q228 Mr Hunt: You started to answer what I was going to tackle you on, which is that if we are going to address having proper risk reduction strategies, you are talking about reaching essentially civil servants in really quite difficult places, the environment part of the state government in Brazil or the coastal agency in Kerala in India. I wonder whether ProVention has actually had success in reaching those kinds of people, what lessons you have learnt about the best way to reach them and what lessons the international community could learn about how to get the message through? Mr Peppiatt: To clarify, we are not an operational agency; we are a consortium and just provide a function as a global partnership involving the World Bank and other IFIs, a number of international development organisations, the private sector and academic institutions of whom perhaps many are acting at that level. So, I cannot say that ProVention has been at work at a country level with governments, but we support the work of the World Bank or the Red Cross and others who do. One interesting thing is the deliberate decision within the financial institutions to particularly target ministries of finance. I think for a long time in the subject of managing disasters we have tended to work with disaster management authorities and said, in terms of institutional building and civil servants, those are the ones we should target, but actually the key decisions are made within ministries of finance to prepare and plan potentially for disasters, and I think there needs to be a much more across the board approach. In the Americas there are some very encouraging success stories of the way the Inter-American Development Bank has worked with a number of countries, similarly across Bangladesh, as I cited, South Africa but beyond that in Africa I would really struggle. I think that an absolute priority is supporting the institutional building and good governance on disaster risk structure in Africa. It is a very alarming situation, the lack of progress on dealing with disaster risk in Africa. Yet, if we look at the last five years alone, the number of people affected by disasters has doubled from the previous five years, and that is set to escalate. Q229 Chairman: Ann McKechin made reference to insurance, or the lack of it, in poor countries. Certainly when we were in Pakistan, obviously we witnessed people who had had their houses destroyed and nobody had any insurance, and then there was a kind of, "Well, who would then be responsible for helping us?" The Government, probably not unreasonably, said, "We will give you all a bit of money and you can go back and build your own houses." They felt that would give people a focused resource. We met, for example, one gentleman in the camp who said, "I think the Government should build the house. I am not going back unless they build me a house." We tried to explain to him that that was not the government policy. It raises the issue that, if there is a cost plan in it anyway, governments should be doing more about individuals who are poor actually getting into that kind of provision, because you might also, of course, make them a little bit more willing to pressurise their governments to build at that end if they are having to pay for it. Do you think that there is potential in this? We have information on the World Food Programme announcing that AXA Re has got the insurance contract, which I find rather intriguing. It says it is a $930,000 contract providing seven million dollar contingency funding to provide coverage in cases of extreme drought during Ethiopia's 2006 agricultural season. I am not an actuary, but that sounds like quite a risk. I wonder how successful it might be as a pilot scheme, but also how you think these things could work or could develop. Mr Peppiatt: I think insurance and risk transfer mechanisms can play, and particularly in transition economies already are playing, a very key role. In Mexico, Honduras, Turkey there have been a number of international support initiatives which have been very successful. The Turkey catastrophe insurance pool in response to the earthquakes is seen as a good example of an insurance solution to addressing seismic or earthquake risk. The real challenge for me on risk transfer schemes is in poor countries, where insurance is simply unaffordable. You will remember that in low developing countries less than one per cent of households have insurance and less than three per cent of businesses have insurance. The coverage at the moment is extremely low, so insurance schemes, or risk transfer schemes, need subsidising. However, it is interesting, seeing some of the experiences coming out of India on micro-insurance, where there has been very high uptake, and also across the Philippines, directly related to insurance for natural disaster losses, and I believe that insurance does have a key role to play. It is an area that the World Bank is investing in heavily in the Caribbean through an insurance pool. It is very complex when you start doing them regionally, but there are some success stories out there and it is one very obvious way to engage the private sector, who is an actor that we desperately need in this area of reducing and minimising risk. Q230 Chairman: Do you happen to know about this Ethiopia? Mr Peppiatt: I know a little. Q231 Chairman: Who is paying the premium? Is it being paid for by individuals? Mr Peppiatt: Donors, bilateral donors. Q232 Chairman: Donors are paying? Mr Peppiatt: Yes. Q233 Chairman: What they are really saying - in a sense they are almost covering their own liability - "If there is a drought, we will have to fund out money, but actually by paying this premium the international insurance market will pay for it and we can use the money for other things"? Mr Peppiatt: It is a smart way of dealing with a predictable financial aid burden on an annual fiscal basis. I do not know how successful. I could not comment on its success rate. Q234 John Battle: I am picking up that there are insurance schemes that have operated in Turkey, which you have said is a model one, and also in Mexico and Honduras? Mr Peppiatt: Honduras. Q235 John Battle: Micro or macro? Mr Peppiatt: Those are more macro. On micro-insurance there are many emerging projects. A lot of these are recent developments in the last five years which have very much come from demand mainly on micro-finance institutions to extend their services to micro-insurance. Q236 John Battle: We could get information on that because it has been supported by the World Bank. They are funding that? Mr Peppiatt: Yes. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I think it has been an interesting aspect, which, if I am honest, was not at the front of my mind when we started this inquiry, but that is why you conduct inquiries, to increase your knowledge. I know you have come here especially to give evidence and so thank you for doing that. If you feel you have any further comments to make, please feel free to get in touch with the Committee. We certainly value your input. Thank you very much for answering our questions.
[1] International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction [2] International Strategy for Disaster Reduction |