As Pakistan faces another monsoon season and the likelihood of more disasters, the country is not prepared. Many factors which have hampered the relief and reconstruction effort are still present, such as an inadequate disaster management system and a lack of emergency relief co-ordination and leadership. These institutional challenges must be resolved as soon as possible. The government and donors need to invest heavily in measures to reduce disaster risks such as better early warning systems, flood control, and more resilient housing. They should also tackle the underlying social inequalities which leave people vulnerable to disasters through a pro-poor national development plan. Spending on risk reduction and preparedness not only saves lives and livelihoods but hugely reduces the economic impact of disasters.
]]>For natural disasters, this assessment of risk is based on detailed modeling and analysis of historical data on the frequency and severity of all manner of disasters. In this report, we examine how homeland security policy could be revised to accommodate climate change impacts on socially vulnerable populations in the Mississippi Delta region and the Gulf Coast, building on the 2009 Oxfam America report, "Exposed: Social vulnerability and climate change in the US Southeast."
]]>Whenever an earthquake or hurricane hits, it is the poorest people who face the greatest risks. They often have no choice but to live in substandard housing that is not built to withstand the intensity of a high-magnitude quake or flood. This means poor and marginalized people are often more vulnerable to injury and death. To make matters worse, often those who do survive have the fewest material resources to recover from disasters. While earthquakes and hurricanes cannot be prevented, the fact that poor communities are disproportionately affected is not a natural condition. It is a human-made problem that results from cultural, socio-economic, political, and institutional factors.
Haiti has a painful history of political instability and humanitarian disasters. The country is still recovering from four serious storms that hit within a few weeks of each other in 2008. Hurricanes and earthquakes exacerbate extreme poverty: they damage neglected infrastructure like roads and drinking water systems, and further degrade the environment. The effects of the January 2010 earthquake will be felt long after the initial recovery period. Survivors—making do with limited resources—face years of hard work to recover. However, disaster losses in the short and long term can be substantially reduced by taking measures to decrease peoples’ vulnerability and build their resilience in the face of hazardous events, whether it is improving immediate living conditions or addressing all the underlying causes of poverty that contribute to increased suffering at the time of emergencies.
Oxfam has been working in Haiti to create sustainable means of earning a living, help Haitians reduce their vulnerability to disasters, and strengthen and support people’s ability to hold their government accountable. These long-term efforts meant that, when the earthquake hit, we already had staff on the ground ready to work with local organizations to respond to the humanitarian crisis.
No country can fully withstand the impact of an earthquake like the one that has rocked Haiti, especially a nation saddled with deep poverty and minimal infrastructure. We know that the communities we work with are strong and determined and will respond to this disaster as they have others. We have a shared responsibility to ensure that Haitians have the resources they need to avoid unnecessary suffering, both now and in the long run.
Help now by donating to our Haiti Earthquake Response Fund.
]]>More than 6 million farmers across the country grow teff, but it’s here, in rugged Adi Ha, where rocks litter the fields like confetti, that this new kind of insurance may take root and spread. An initiative coordinated by Oxfam America and supported by more than a dozen partners, its goal is to help some of the world’s poorest farmers bounce back when drought destroys their crops. And the payout isn’t only in cash. It’s in confidence—the kind that may help propel people out of poverty.
“Without insurance, poor farmers who experience drought might run through all their savings, fall into debt, or sell their livestock and other valuables—often to ruinous results,” says Mengesha Gebremichael, the micro-insurance officer at the Relief Society of Tigray and one of the project’s managers. “In contrast, insured farmers will be more resilient to those shocks. They’ll be in a better position to take out small loans that could help them make big improvements in their next harvest—loans for things like high-yield seeds. They’ll be more confident that they can pay the money back knowing they have insurance to support them if trouble strikes.”
June to October marks the main rainy season in Adi Ha, a critical time for local farmers who depend on the skies to water their teff fields. For poor families living close to the edge, where even a $20 or $30 loss can push them over, there is no room for mishap. Without rain, they face disaster. That’s where the weather insurance comes in. If a certain amount of rain fails to fall at a certain time, farmers who have purchased the insurance can receive a payout to help cover their losses.
In Ethiopia, families have always had traditional ways of coping with extraordinary expenses. If they lose their livestock in a disaster, such as drought, those who are better off will contribute an animal or two to help them rebuild their herds, for instance. Families may also share seeds for planting, or food when it’s in terribly short supply.
But with climate change—and the erratic weather that it brings—the traditional means of surviving bad times may no longer be enough.
“Climate change is dramatically increasing agricultural risk across the planet,” says Marjorie Victor Brans, a senior policy advisor at Oxfam America. “The frequency of droughts and other shocks in Adi Ha is likely to increase, and poor farmers will be among the hardest hit. It’s a hugely challenging phenomenon.”
With 85 percent of Ethiopians employed in farming, much of it rain-fed, the need for new tools to manage the risks is huge. But the market for insurance is miniscule: only about 300,000 people in a country of nearly 80 million now have it. Extending the option to rural areas is loaded with challenges, not the least of them being the concern that poor farmers simply don’t have the money to pay for premiums—even the smallest one.
This new program has solved that problem with a simple solution: It has arranged for the poorest farmers to use their labor to buy insurance, tapping into a new social security initiative the Ethiopian government launched a few years ago. Called the Productive Safety Net Program, or PSNP, it helps about 8 million of the country’s most vulnerable residents by providing them with food or cash in exchange for work. Through the PSNP, 130 Adi Ha farmers are now working extra days on community projects, such as planting trees and grasses to promote soil and water conservation, to pay for their premiums. In this pilot year, Oxfam provided funds to the PSNP to cover this part of the project.
The option to trade labor for insurance has substantially boosted the number of farmers able to participate in the program, nearly doubling the enrollment that was expected.
“It’s good for me to have the insurance as long as I can work and pay with labor,” says Medhin Reda, a single mother who will be working 24 days for her premium. “That is the only asset I have.”
For Selas Samson Biru, who is spending 192 birr on insurance, it will help address the uncertainties that have always been part of farming, especially now that global warming may be altering familiar weather patterns.
“Our season is changing. We don’t know when there will be a bad year and when there will be a good year,” she says. “I believe, after taking the training, this insurance will be helpful during the bad season. This will pay me.”
And the insurance may be extra helpful because it was tailored specifically for farmers like Biru. In fact, she was one of five community members chosen by villagers to join the insurance design team. Twenty-one other farmers participated in a series of test workshops on climate change and financial literacy. Focus group discussions and economic risk simulations carried out in the community helped the design team understand what kind of insurance product would work best in Adi Ha. And on the day of enrollment, about 600 farmers showed up for a host of activities explaining the offerings, including musical performances, a play, peer-to-peer outreach, and financial training.
“Today is a historic day for the farmers of Adi Ha,” said Brans as the activities wound to a close that day and organizers counted the final tally of takers. Among the 200 were 75 women, which represents about 22 percent of all female-headed households in Adi Ha—one of the most vulnerable groups the project is aiming to help. On average, farmers are paying 138 birr for their premiums—or a little more than $12 each. Some chose packages that allowed them to pay as little as 76 birr, or about $6.75. The maximum premium was 288 birr, or just over $23.
“We are experimenting,” said Gebru Kahsay a few months after investing 192 birr into an insurance package. “We started with teff. If we find the insurance is good, we’ll continue. If we fail, we will take a lesson from it.”
Lots of learning has already taken place during the 18 months Oxfam and its partners spent in preparation for the launch of this project. And each of those partners has been contributing its own expertise. Besides the Relief Society of Tigray, or REST, one of the largest aid groups in Africa which has worked closely with the people of Adi Ha, other partners include the Nyala Insurance Company, an Ethiopian firm that is providing the insurance; Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest insurers which has helped fund the launch and is providing technical expertise; and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, which is providing research on climate data. Additionally, the Dedebit Credit and Savings Institution, or DECSI, the primary provider of loans to families in Adi Ha, helped both to design the pilot and to educate farmers about the pros and cons of insurance.
“We had to work very hard to design a risk management package that was affordable and attractive to farmers, while still being potentially profitable to the insurance industry,” says Bekabil Fufa, an agricultural expert in Oxfam America’s Horn of Africa regional office. “And we had to make it compelling to government and donors who feel it will address the threat of climate change.”
With a solid model now in place, Oxfam is planning in the coming year to expand the initiative into four new villages in Tigray--the region where Adi Ha is located—and into one village in Amhara, another drought-prone region to the south. Eventually, the project partners would like to see weather insurance offered to poor farmers throughout Ethiopia.
It will require a leap of faith by farmers across the country as well as support from the government, donors, NGOs, and the private sector,” says Gebremichael. “But given the long lead times required to build resiliency to climate change, we can’t afford to wait until tomorrow to try.”
]]>The rise in numbers—from the current 250 million per year to 375 million by 2015—is due to the increasing threat of climate change-induced severe weather events and inability of millions of people worldwide to prepare to deal with such catastrophes. In the report, The Right to Survive, Oxfam America recommends adequate and urgent investments in climate change adaptation and an overhaul of the current system of humanitarian assistance in order to meet the challenge of more frequent and devastating disasters.
"Entrenched poverty in many parts of the world makes people more vulnerable to disasters," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, President of Oxfam America. "Climate change is already threatening our work to overcome poverty, and now it is increasing the pressure on our relief work. It is crucial that we tackle global warming head on by cutting dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, but we must also invest in community preparedness to cope with climate-related disasters."
According to the report, the international humanitarian system must change the way it delivers aid, with a focus on helping build countries’ ability to prepare and withstand future shocks. The report recommends increased humanitarian aid to ensure there is adequate funding to support timely, effective, and good-quality humanitarian action. In addition, Oxfam urged aid providers—including the US government—to act impartially after a disaster, investing money and effort to commensurate with the levels of need.
As climate-related disasters increase, aid must be more focused on preparing communities, working with local NGOs and governments to create relief that works in the long-term, and helping make vulnerable communities stronger in the face of climate change.
"Communities around the world have the knowledge and experience to craft their response to the negative impacts of climate change, but they need adequate funding to make it happen," said Offenheiser. "Investing in community resilience, especially for the most vulnerable, must be a cornerstone of any American effort on climate change."
The report is released right as important climate change legislation is moving through the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives and as the White House prepares to host a high-level meeting of developed countries in Washington on climate change.
"Now is the time for bold action on climate," said Offenheiser. "We must not only improve our response to disasters, but also fund measures that help communities adapt to climate change. After all, it is poverty and failure to recognize everyone’s right to survive that turn a storm into a disaster."
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UPDATE: April 2011
This note is to briefly explain why Oxfam has revised its view of its 2009 forecast of a likely rise in the number of people affected by climate-related disasters.
Two years ago Oxfam did an analysis of the number of people affected by past climate-related events. From this analysis we made a forecast that by 2015 it was likely that the average annual number of people affected by climate-related disasters would be 375 million and this represented an increase of 54 per cent compared with the average figure of the decade 1998-2007.
Having reviewed the data and the method we used to analyse the data we are no longer confident in the specific approach we used, given the nature of the data, as described below, and so we are no longer confident of this specific forecast.
Our concerns are essentially two-fold: the limitations of the data and the limitations of the way we analysed the data.
The limitations of the data: The data we used was from EM-DAT, the international disaster database managed by CRED, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. This is a respected set of data which captures, amongst other things, the number of disasters that has happened and the number of people affected.
Like most sets of data it has its limitations. In EM-DAT’s case one of the key limitations is that the more recent data is more reliable. This was well known to us and we dealt with this in our analysis by using double exponential smoothing on the data (see the explanation of how we carried out the analysis and catered for the data’s limitation).
However one limitation we did not know at the time and have only recently discovered is that the number of people affected by climate-related disasters in China is unusually low in first half of the 1980s when compared with subsequent years. It is highly likely that this is the result of under reporting from China. Given the size of China’s population its disaster figures are significant when considering the global picture. The likely impact of this on our forecast may mean that we started our analysis with data from 1980 that was likely to be unreasonably low and therefore made our projected increase in the number of people affected artificially high.
We now know that there has been a significant increase in reporting from many other countries over the same period due to better information and communication.
Limitations of our analysis: Though we were clear in our explanation of the way we came to our conclusion that “different forecasting models could lead to different results,” what we should have done, particularly given the high volatility of the data especially in 2002, was run these different models to help determine the degree of confidence in the conclusion we came to.
It does not mean though that there will not be an increase in the numbers of people affected by disasters in the future. There is evidence to point to this likelihood.
According to EM-DAT the number of climate-related disasters has increased by 35 per cent from the 1990s to the 2000s. Floods have increased by 50 per cent over the same period. Munich Re’s database of global disasters also shows an increasing trend in climate-related events. It is not possible to know how much of this is an increase in events or better reporting of events and neither can we assume that an increase in events will lead to an equal increase in numbers affected.
Population growth means that there is a likelihood of more people being affected by climate-related events.
The number of people exposed to some climate-related events is also on the increase. According to the forthcoming United Nations Global Assessment Report 2011 the number of people exposed to floods and cyclones has doubled between 1970 and 2010. It is likely that many people who are ‘exposed’ to hazards are not affected due to measures that protect them, such as flood defences for example. However in many vulnerable countries investment and efforts to reduce significantly the risk of disasters is sorely lacking leaving millions exposed and likely to be affected by disasters.
Finally as the effects of climate change become more apparent there are more frequent and more intense climate-related events according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report.
Oxfam is in the process of further research into the number of people affected by climate-related events and will be publishing the results of this research in due course.
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