Buried in the coverage of last year’s Great East Japan Earthquake is a success story of which the world should not lose sight, because it tells us much about how we manage risk in the 21st century. It is the story of how the Japanese people, through centuries of memory and shared experience, have built up their resilience to natural disasters. Indeed, as the sea reared up to ravage the country’s coast on March 11 last year, more than 90 percent of the population in the affected areas had already fled to safety.
That safety was further endangered by the meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, a catastrophe with which Japan is still coping. Nevertheless, the country can take heart that so many of its people, children in particular, are alive today because of early-warning systems, safety drills and a strong emphasis on disaster-risk reduction in the school curriculum.
The world has been paying greater attention to reducing loss of life from disasters. And yet, while mortality risk relative to population size is falling, the lives of more than 200 million people continue to be disrupted each year by disasters. Moreover, economic costs are soaring, with insured losses reaching a record-high US$380 billion last year.
Over the last 40 years, the world’s population has almost doubled, to 7 billion, but global exposure to tropical cyclones has almost tripled. More than 100 million people experience floods each year, and roughly 370 million live in earthquake-prone cities.
Given the rapid pace of urbanization and the technology base that a well-resourced city requires, the risk of “synchronous failure” is growing constantly, as the Great East Japan Earthquake demonstrated. The earthquake disrupted critical sections of Japan’s electricity grid, including the power supply needed to cool the spent fuel at Fukushima, while the tsunami disabled back-up generators at the plant, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986.
The broader lesson should be clear: When a natural hazard wreaks havoc on a power grid, there is a high potential for cascading impacts on dependent systems, such as banking and finance, government services, transport and communications, and drinking water. Moreover, as new drivers of risk emerge and interact, longstanding assumptions about disasters are being called into question. In 2010, western Russia experienced July temperatures almost 8°C above the long-term average, which, combined with lack of rainfall, led to wildfires across 800,000 hectares of parched fields, forests and peat lands.
Moscow and its surroundings, with a population of more than 15 million inhabitants, were covered by smoke for many weeks. People with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, the elderly and the very young were particularly affected. During and after the wildfires, Russia’s mortality rate rose 18 percent.
Floods in Thailand last year threw 700,000 people out of work and had knock-on economic effects around the world. The Economist reports that US bank JPMorgan has estimated that the disaster set back global industrial production by a surprisingly large 2.5 percent. Economic exposure to floods is increasing faster than per capita GDP in all regions.
Human happiness and economic well-being are also being affected by climate change, which may be contributing to what could turn out to be a third consecutive year of drought in sub-Saharan Africa — and this amid growing food-security concerns in a world with 1 billion underfed people.
Much of the world was shaken from its lethargy on disaster preparedness by the Asian tsunami in December 2004. The following month, 168 countries adopted an international blueprint for disaster-risk reduction at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, hosted by the city of Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, the scene in 1995 of one of Japan’s worst earthquakes, with more than 5,000 lives lost.
The resulting Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 was a watershed moment in establishing disaster-risk reduction and climate-change adaptation as hallmarks of good governance. Most of the countries that stand to benefit from the Hyogo Framework do not have Japan’s long historical experience of battling natural hazards. The Framework can help them understand their exposure and vulnerability in today’s hazardous world, and to set priorities for action in developing a culture of prevention.
That is why, as the Hyogo Framework comes to an end, it is important to start thinking now about its replacement, which will guide us through the thicket of risks emerging in the urbanized, interdependent world of the twenty-first century.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has already started to talk with governments, local government partners and a broad spectrum of civil-society organizations to prepare a new framework in time for the next World Conference on Disaster Reduction in 2015, which, not surprisingly, will again be hosted by Japan. The outcome will certainly reflect what was learned from last year’s earthquake and tsunami, and seek to encourage deeper political and economic commitment to disaster-risk reduction and resilience worldwide.
Margareta Wahlstrom is the head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS