World Disasters Report 2010 - International Federation of Red Cross ...

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As large cities have grown without the necessary infrastructure, so the gap between
what is needed and what is affordable can widen to an almost impossible degree (see
Chapter 2). More than 50 per cent of the population of many large cities in Africa and
Asia live in settlements without basic infrastructure. The haphazard spatial expansion
of a city and the concentration of many low-income settlements on flood plains, steep
slopes or other sites at risk add to the costs. The capacity of municipal governments in
most cities in low-income nations to invest in necessary infrastructure remains limited,
however, even if they have been able to modernize tax collection systems or have better
cost-recovery for services such as water supplies. And this is not helped by the reluctance
of most bilateral aid agencies to support urban development.
Infrastructure to prevent disaster risks is often costly to both build and maintain. The
devastating floods that affected Santa Fe, Argentina, in 2003 and 2007 were in part
due to incomplete or unmaintained infrastructure. The city has increasingly expanded
on to the Río Salado flood plain. To protect itself from floods, it had to create embankments
and dykes, but the infrastructure to protect certain city areas was supposed to be
in place shortly after 1998 but was never completed due to lack of resources. In addition,
the pumps and drainage systems installed to evacuate water in protected areas did
not work because of vandalism and lack of maintenance.
Box 7.3 Good governance and disaster risk reduction in Aceh
According to the Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disasters, more than 19 million
of Indonesia’s 210 million people have
been affected by 309 disasters in the last two
decades. Aceh, the westernmost province of
Indonesia, is inhabited by some 4 million people.
On 26 December 2004, Aceh was struck
by an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter
scale and the subsequent tsunami left 130,000
people dead, 37,000 missing and an additional
500,000 people displaced. Damage
and losses were estimated at US$ 4.8 billion.
Aceh was also suffering from a 30-year conflict
that had claimed the lives of 15,000 people
by the time a peace agreement was signed in
August 2005.
The international and national shift in
paradigm from focusing on disaster response
to enhancing disaster risk reduction underpins
the reform process in Indonesia. Collaboration
between the government, civil society organizations
and international agencies led to a
disaster management law, which was enacted
in 2007. The law authorizes the creation
of a National Disaster Management Agency
(BNPB), which reports directly to the president
of Indonesia and has a mandate to coordinate
all contingency, preparedness, mitigation,
prevention, disaster management training
and disaster risk reduction activities (i.e., risk
assessment and mapping). The law also addresses
and regulates the development and
application of disaster management and disaster
risk reduction plans at national and local
levels. Following passage of the law, the president
issued Presidential Regulation 8/2008,
which formally established the BNPB. Soon
afterwards, the minister of home affairs issued
Decree No. 46/2008 mandating the establishment
of local disaster management agencies in