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Lord Giddens: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, for initiating this debate on such an important subject. It is a shame that there are so few noble Lords here in the Chamber to debate it. I venture that if this debate had been about Africa the Chamber would be much more full. I remind noble Lords—and perhaps the Minister—that there are more very poor people in east Asia than in sub-Saharan Africa. Of course concentration on Africa is important—and vital, given the coming up of the G8 conference—but we must remember to focus our attention at a more global level.

The tsunami in the Indian Ocean was, as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, said, one of the worst natural disasters in modern times. An estimated 270,000 people were killed in the disaster; many more were injured; even more lost their sources of livelihood or their homes; there was massive damage to infrastructure.

When it happened the world's attention was focused on the tsunami, not just because of its devastating nature but also because it was, as it were, an expression of globalisation. The events interacted with the global tourist industry. We do not completely know how many people from what countries died in the tsunami, but it is estimated that people from 70 countries died there.

The response of the world was very generous. As has been mentioned, in this country there was an enormous out-flowing of generosity at that point and the Government made a very quick response. But there plainly are problems of reconstruction, some of which have been touched on by the noble Lord,
 
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Lord Naseby. I have seen many different estimates of the shortfall of money required. The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, mentioned various areas of shortfall but, overall, all the calculations that I have seen—including a very recent one by the Asian Development Bank—put the figure for shortfall at more than $4 billion, a very significant sum.

I remind the Minister that there is a big difference between aid which is pledged and aid which is delivered. The world does not have a good record on the delivery of pledges. In 2000, there was an earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam in which some 3,000 people were killed. A sum of $1.1 billion was pledged from the world community for reconstruction, but so far only 1.5 per cent of that aid has been delivered. We have to ensure that this does not happen in the case of the tsunami disaster.

Devastating though it was, we cannot understand the process of reconstruction and the implications of the tsunami without placing it in a much broader context. The 21st century is likely to be marked by larger disasters and larger catastrophes than the world has ever seen before. I should like to offer—if the House will forgive my quasi-academic manner—three reasons for this.

First, we live in a world of intensifying globalisation, which is the characteristic feature of our epoch. What does globalisation mean? It means increasing interdependence. It means an increasing economic interdependence, political interdependence and cultural interdependence of world society. As we know, the expansion of globalisation brings many benefits. Economic globalisation is the condition of effective economic development in poorer countries, not a barrier to it.

But globalisation—meaning interdependence—also has a massive downside. There are new risks that we must face. Let us consider, for example, world financial markets, which are far more integrated than they ever were before. We know that such markets can produce shocks. It is possible that there could be a meltdown in global financial markets. Every country in the world today would, of course, be affected if that should happen.

Secondly, in the case of purely natural disasters such as the tsunami, there is good reason to suppose that the consequences of such natural disasters are much greater than they used to be because they intersect with modernisation and economic development. For example, we have erratic urbanisation, where thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of people live on the edges of ravines, on the top of mountains, in volcanic areas and near flood plains. We have to take on board very seriously this intersection between global disaster and development. The tsunami is a big example of it but we have to generalise it far more.

The third reason is that the world must deal with a new range of not quite natural disasters but disasters stemming from human technological intervention in nature. For many hundreds of years people worried primarily about what nature can do to us. Not long
 
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ago, for good reason, we started worrying more about what we have done to nature. And what we have done to nature has created imponderable risks for us, which, again, intersect with purely natural risks. Yesterday, there was a large-scale flood in China in which 87 people died. It was apparently caused by excessive rainfall. We just do not know how far such episodes are natural or not, but we can be quite sure that they will expand if we do not take systematic preventative action.

The UNDP report on world disaster contains a very interesting analysis. It considered disasters over the past 20 or so years, from 1980 to 2000, and found that 75 per cent of the world's population live in areas which have experienced at least one serious natural disaster over the past 20 years, whether a tropical cyclone, earthquake, large-scale drought or large-scale flooding. According to the report, 1.5 million people died in natural disasters over this period. Across the planet, that is probably more people than died in wars over that 20-year period.

We know also that catastrophe and disaster affect developing societies disproportionately. Eleven per cent of the population live in the various very poorest countries of the world, as designated by the World Bank. That 11 per cent of the population experienced no less than 53 per cent of overall deaths from catastrophes over that 20-year period.

We are only just starting to recognise how connected disaster and catastrophe are with economic development. We tend to think of economic development as a kind of long-term flowing process and disaster and catastrophe as coming from out of the side field, as coming from nowhere. But it is not like that. There is a systematic connection between disaster, catastrophe and development.

This systematic connection can very much affect, for example, the millennium development goals. Part of the reason for that is that catastrophe in poorer countries is less easily preventable and its immediate consequences tend to be much more severe and much more long-term than they are in developed countries. We therefore need to forge much closer connections between economic development policy and disaster management than we have done previously.

If time allows I shall conclude by making three or four policy observations which I should like the Government to consider at least—or for the Minister to say that she will take them seriously.

First, we have to integrate disaster management and risk assessment with economic development programmes in a direct way. We have to integrate these issues and not just treat disaster management as an add-on. That means building risk assessment into development programmes; it means creating knowledgeability among local populations; and it means looking at vulnerability in different parts of the world and assessing its potential implications for economic and other kinds of development. It is crucial to have a much greater integration of these issues than we have had.
 
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Secondly, it has become a convention of the economic development literature that you cannot develop from top down; you have to develop from bottom up and empower local communities. The same is true of disaster reduction and management. We have to empower local communities to anticipate disasters and to have the means and resources to deal with them. That involves very much the same kind of issues as apply in overall economic development. For instance, the role of women needs to be considered. We know that the role of women is central to economic development bottom up, but it is also very important in disaster management because of the centrality of women in the family and in the larger community. We must therefore have community development relevant to disaster assessment.

Thirdly, we need much more effective forms of technical assessment, especially of natural and not-so natural disasters. As I understand it, the Indian Government have committed themselves to developing an early warning system for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean within a period of two years. It remains to be seen, of course, whether that will actually eventuate. They have also promised that this will be integrated with wider world management systems for disasters. We need something more systematic. We need to deal with natural and not so natural disasters. The proposal to create a global observation system that would integrate data from climate, data from the ocean, and data from echo systems as a kind of world informational system for disaster anticipation and management is an important development.

Finally, we must consider multiple risks, because each of the three types of risk that I mentioned interact with one another; and that particularly affects poor countries. Natural disasters can accentuate economic shocks and the disintegration of local communities and can affect education and policy programmes. Some disasters we cannot control, and sometimes nature reminds us of its power in relation to human capacity. We can always control and try to regulate the consequences of disasters. I ask the Minister to assure me that we will look for a world in which that is done not only in the rich countries but in the poor ones.

4.51 pm

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