Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Eight countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus and five in Southeast Asia are implementing early warning systems to protect against weather-related events, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Today 14 October is International  Day for Disaster Reduction, and the agency is highlighting how early warning and disaster risk reduction can save many lives when extreme weather strikes. Similar projects were introduced in seven southeast European countries in 2007.

These national and regional cooperation projects are part of a concerted programme that relies on technical expertise and funding provided by the WMO, the World Bank, UNDP and the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR).

“Natural hazards are a part of life. But natural hazards only become disasters when people’s lives and livlihoods are swept away…” (Kofi Annan, World Disaster Reduction Day, 2003)

In 2006 a survey conducted by the WMO showed that 60 percent of the participating national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS), especially those of the most vulnerable countries, lacked the infrastructure and the capacities to adequately provide warnings to their populations.

The WMO says that since 1980 over 8,400 natural disasters have caused almost 2 million people to die and $1.5 trillion in economic losses. Most of these disasters are weather-related. But as Geoffrey Love of the WMO’s weather, disaster risk reduction department says, “they only become disasters when we fail to prepare for them”.

Disaster risk-reduction is WMO’s mission

The past six weeks have seen typhoons in Southeast Asia that have destroyed houses, crops and livlihoods, as well as over 500 deaths in three countries; flooding and mudslides claimed the lives of over 500 people in Taiwan, and widespread flooding but few fatalities in Japan. And even in Sicily, Italy heavy rains caused mudslides that killed 25 people. WMO says that the the number of weather-, water-, and climate-related disasters has increased 50-fold in the past 50 years, yet the loss of life has decreased by 10. This is mainly due to effective disaster risk-reduction strategies. Disasters are “foreseeable to the extent we understand their liklihood”, points out WMO’s Love.

The WMO has made the provision of first-class and timely information concerning weather-, climate- and water-related events the heart of its mission. Getting that information into the hands of the people who can effectively use it to warn of disasters before they happen is the job of the WMO’s 188 member countries’ national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS).

Applying the lessons learned to mitigate the effects of extreme weather

It is also a question of organization. The effective operational cooperation between the national weather service in Bangladesh and its national disaster risk management agency in November 2007 meant that “super cyclone” Sidr claimed fewer than 3,500 lives. Other cyclones in 1970 and 1991 caused storm surges that claimed the lives of 440,000 people between them. In Cuba, each ministry is charged with drawing up disaster management plans and activating them in case of a hurricane. These preparations are credited with the ability of the island to withstand five hurricanes in a row in 2008 with the loss of seven lives. In Cuba, people are required to leave their homes when a warning is issued, but people also know that their homes will not be looted when they are gone.

The 2004 New Year tsunami that struck first Indonesia and went on to kill an estimated 300,000 people around the Indian ocean galvanized efforts to coordinate national and regional warning systems to protect people at risk from tsunamis. In the past two weeks, tsunami warnings have successfully been called in the Samoas, western Indonesia and New Zealand, even though the disaster struck in the Samoas too quickly for the warning to have been useful.

Links to other sites: WMO Disaster Risk Reduction Programme

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