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

CHAPTER 1
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to share their grief and in their own time begin to participate in rebuilding. These
responses have to strengthen and support the survivors’ own organizations. They have
to keep women at the centre of these associations, even though this is often difficult
as priorities and actions are dominated by more aggressive and well-connected groups.
This is not easy. People have been affected in many different ways and may have different
priorities; they may see other affected groups as competitors in seeking funds
or support from different external organizations. Good practice means involving local
people right at the outset of any discussion of rebuilding and in managing the shift
from relief to reconstruction.
The shift from immediate response to reconstruction in an urban environment is never
easy. Rarely does this help those most affected with their two most pressing priorities:
supporting the survivors to rebuild their homes and their livelihoods. After a disaster,
the needs for medical treatment, healthcare, food and water, and often temporary
accommodation are so obvious. But the disaster does not undo the often antagonistic
relationships between local governments and the urban poor and their informal communities
and livelihoods. Disaster relief agencies cannot address the root causes of why
so much of a city’s population was so heavily impacted – because they lived in illegal
settlements with poor-quality homes on dangerous and disaster-prone sites to which
the government had refused to provide infrastructure and services. Disaster relief agencies
often fail to secure safer, well-located land sites for housing where those who lost
their homes in informal settlements can build; such sites are too valuable and those
in government and higher-income groups would not support this. All they can offer
are sites far away that do not have good access to income-earning opportunities. So all
the inequalities and difficulties that faced the urban poor prior to the disaster remain
to constrain post-disaster responses. As the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights has
noted, unless disaster aid quickly learns to work with the untitled, the unregistered,
the unlisted and the undocumented, it can support and even reinforce the inequalities
that existed prior to the disaster.
Strengthening and supporting local action for
disaster risk reduction in urban areas
Good development, good disaster risk reduction and good adaptation to climate
change are all intensely local with many links and complementarities between them.
They need effective local institutions that are accountable to citizens including those
living in informal settlements. It all amounts to a difficult challenge for the international
agencies that fund development and will be difficult for those assigned the
responsibilities of funding climate change adaptation. All such agencies are under pressure
to keep down staff costs and to have exit strategies. All such funding agencies are
only as effective as the local intermediaries that they fund. The strong emphasis of this
year’s World Disasters Report is on supporting community-level initiatives because in
almost all low-income and most middle-income nations, this is the only way to ensure