BANGKOK: The changing response to natural disasters by civil society groups and the government has reduced the need for an on-the-ground presence of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Pakistan and some other Asian countries.
Outgoing head of OCHA's Asia-Pacific Bangkok office Oliver Lacey-Hall said of Pakistan and Thailand, “We're seeing this kind of changing regional environment, which means there is less requirement for OCHA to be 'on the ground' in those countries."
Major disasters such as floods in Thailand and Pakistan, and the Indian Ocean and Japan tsunamis, galvanised governments and civil society groups to make their countries more resilient.
About a decade ago, before the Japanese tsunami, many countries in the region did not have natural disaster management authorities, he said, and OCHA used to go into disaster-hit countries and coordinate humanitarian aid themselves.
Lacey-Hall said he recently told Indonesia's national disaster management authority:
“Our sense is that you don't need us in the way that you did before." Answer? "Absolutely, we don't," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
After a decade of responding to massive floods, storms and earthquakes, the UN is downsizing its humanitarian staff in some Asian countries where governments have stepped up with funds and manpower .
The UN OCHA says it will close in Papua New Guinea this month and Sri Lanka by the end of the year, while “radically downsizing” in Indonesia, said Lacey-Hall.
It will, however, maintain its regional office in Bangkok to help governments prepare for disasters and support coordination of assistance after disaster strikes.
“If we have a large-scale disaster in this region ─ as you saw in Nepal ─ boom, we're in there. And we provide that support fairly rapidly,” Lacey-Hall said.
OCHA's Nepal office, which was meant to close this week, was scaled up from one person to more than 30 after the earthquakes in April and May.