Avian Flu Diary: DFID: World Unprepared For Future Shocks

# 6040

The DFID (Department for International Development) – which is a UK government agency that manages aid to developing countries – issued a warning yesterday that the world is `dangerously unprepared’ to deal with future shocks.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell warns that while a system is in place to provide humanitarian relief after disasters (UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund CERF), too few countries and agencies are fully funding it.

First their press release, then I’ll return with more.

World 'dangerously unprepared' for future shocks

27 December 2011

Some of the world's richest countries are failing to help prepare for large-scale disasters, such as earthquakes, floods and wars, despite clear evidence that the number of catastrophes is likely to increase in the years ahead, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell warned today.

Despite a year of unprecedented disasters – including famine in the Horn of Africa, the Japan tsunami, New Zealand earthquake, floods in Pakistan and most recently the Philippines – the United Nations’ international disaster response funding system is expected to be left severely underfunded.

The system – set up following the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami – is designed to bring different countries funding into one single pot that makes the international response faster and more effective.

Experts believe that a sufficiently supported, single approach, with a central fund and effective coordination by the UN will save many more lives in the hours and days after a shock hits. It will reduce the chaos, confusion and delays caused by dozens of countries and agencies responding to the same disaster independently.

(Continue . . .)

With global economies in turmoil, and recessionary fears continuing to spread, finding money for many relief, humanitarian, or other worthwhile projects becomes more difficult.

As reported earlier this month by IRIN:

. . . . money for HIV/AIDS efforts is not as plentiful as in previous years hardly comes as a surprise. UNAIDS notes that the global economic crisis appears to have put an end to a decade of funding increases by donors - after flattening out in 2009 for the first time, international AIDS assistance fell by 10 percent in 2010.

And the story is much the same around the globe for many other humanitarian, relief, and public health programs.

Funding cuts - either already implemented or threatened - endanger the ability of government agencies and NGOs to provide the kind of aid and support they have in the past.

Last week in TFAH: 2011 Ready or Not Report on public health preparedness in the United States, they wrote that this year’s big concern is that the gains of the past few years may be eroded due to budgetary constraints.

The catch-22 to all of this is that the less well we are prepared to deal with disasters - the greater the impact these shocks may have on the global economy - further eroding our ability to prepare.

That was the theme of a blog I wrote last July (OECD Report: Future Global Shocks), where we looked at a 139 page report released by the OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) that warned - as the world becomes more interconnected and interdependent - that `Global Shocks’ to the world economy become more likely.

In the report, they define a Global Shock as: a rapid onset event with severely disruptive consequences covering at least two continents.

They write:

Extremely disruptive events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, financial crises and political revolutions destabilize critical systems of supply, producing economic spillovers that reach far beyond
their geographical point of origin.

While such extreme events have been relatively rare in the past, they seem poised to occur with greater frequency in the future. Global interconnections accompanying economic integration enable some risks to propagate rapidly around the world.

While discussing a wide range of future shock scenarios, the authors concentrated most of their attention on five highly disruptive future shock events.

A Pandemic
A Cyber Attack
A Financial Crisis
A Geomagnetic Storm
Social Unrest/Revolution

They also make special note of the risks of increased antibiotic resistance, and the need for new antibiotics to be developed.

While you and I can do little about the level of international preparedness for disasters (other than being generous volunteering time or money to reputable NGOs), there remains an important role and responsibility for all of us; to be prepared to help ourselves, and our community, during any disaster.

Ultimately, a nation’s resilience in the face of a major crisis –whether it be local or global - comes from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Which is why agencies, like the ones below, urge greater individual, family, and community preparedness.