Standing in front of a door which is the only part of her former school left standing, this Nepali teenager clutches a dog-eared book recovered from the rubble. 

Three months after a devastating earthquake struck the Himalayan country, Pabitrya Paudyal, 13, is one of a million children who continue to live in areas at high risk of landslides and floods following two devastating earthquakes on April 25 and May 12.

The destroyed Chaturmala Higher Secondary School where she once went is in Muchowk, Gorkha, one of the districts most severely affected by the two disasters.

Four teachers died in the school, putting them among the almost 9,000 people who perished in the two natural disasters little more than two weeks apart. 

Inadequate shelter, school closures and a lack of safe water and sanitation are the three biggest concerns for Nepali children according to Unicef.   

 

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Family bond: Rita Shrestha bottle-feeds her two-year-old daughter, Elina al Krishna Shivakoti, in their family's earthquake-damaged restaurant in a bazar in Dolakha District, epicentre of the May 12 earthquake

In a series of haunting images released by the charity Saraswati Saru Magar, 15, stands beside her three-year-old nephew outside a temporary shelter in Sitalpati Village Development Committee in Sindhuli.

Saraswati, whose house was damaged during the earthquake, has been living in the temporary shelter built from the remains.

She says she really misses going to her school, despite it being about a two-hour walk each way, saying: 'I am afraid of the ongoing aftershocks and constantly feel the fear of death.'

In a further photo Dil Bahadur Darain holds his 13-year-old granddaughter Anjali Darain's hand outside their house in Salyantar Village Development Committee in Dhading, another badly hit area. Anjali lost her father, mother and younger brother to the quake in April 25.

And in a third Rita Shrestha bottle-feeds her two-year-old daughter, Elina al Krishna Shivakoti, in their family's earthquake-damaged restaurant in a bazar in Dolakha District, epicentre of the May 12 quake. 

As the rainy season takes hold, access to the most severely affected areas is becoming increasingly challenging, threatening these children's access to water, sanitation, education and health services and putting them at a higher risk of exploitation and abuse, including trafficking.

More than 10,000 children have been identified as acutely malnourished since the first earthquake. These include more than 1,000 children with severely acute malnutrition. 

 Keeping on: A young girl stands inside a temporary learning centre in Shree Chaturmala Higher Secondary School in Muchowk, Gorkha

 

Enjoying the sun: Two adolescent girls wash clothes near rubble from destroyed homes in the earthquake-affected town of Singati, near Charikot in Dolakha District

More 200 children remain without a parent or caregiver, and more than 600 have lost one or both of their parents to the quakes. More than 32,000 classrooms have been destroyed and nearly 900,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed.

Children interviewed by aid agencies for a major survey published Saturday expressed worry about the lack of privacy and space, with younger children fearing attacks by wild animals, and girls feeling vulnerable to sexual harassment.

'Living under the sky increases our exposure to abuse,' an adolescent girl from Sindhupalchowk, a district badly hit by the earthquakes, told an aid worker. 

At least 2.8million people, around 10 per cent of Nepal's population, need urgent help according to a UN report published earlier this month.

source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Islamabad—Speakers at a seminar on Friday linked the natural disasters with health challenges saying the government needed to double efforts to deal with challenges in the natural calamity-hit areas. Minister for National Health Services Regulations & Coordination (NHSRC) Saira Afzal Tarar, President Heartfile Pakistan Dr Sania Nishtar, Federal Secretary Seerat Asghar, President of The Rockefeller Foundation Dr Judith Rodin were among the speakers highlighting the health woes of people living in natural disaster-hit areas.

Speaking on the occasion, National Health Services Minister Saira Afzal Tarar said, “Our country is frequently challenged by natural disasters; hence we are fully cognizant of the need to accord this area priority.”

A report ‘Planetary Health Commission Report’ was also launched on the occasion. Health Minister said environmental challenges had been double edged for us in terms of policy responses. Monsoon flooding brings in its wake acute challenges of an emergency nature but on the other hand they are the slow and insidious water shortage issues, she gave an example.

We see evidence of both, day to day, she said. She said the government’s foremost concern was to ensure safety of the population there and get them on the road to recovery and rehabilitation soon.

A new report released today by The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, calls for immediate, global action to protect the health of human civilization and the natural systems on which it depends. The report, Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch, provides the first ever comprehensive examination of evidence showing how the health and well-being of future generations is being jeopardised by the unprecedented degradation of the planet’s natural resources and ecological systems.

The report was written by a Commission of 15 leading academics and policymakers from institutions in 8 countries, including Dr. Sania Nishtar, President Heartfile Pakistan. It demonstrates how human activity and development have pushed to near breaking point the boundaries of the natural systems that support and sustain human civilizations.

“The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Planetary Health Commission has issued a dire warning: human action is undermining the resilience of the earth’s natural systems, and in so doing we are compromising our own resilience, along with our health and, frankly, our future,” said Dr Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. “We are in a symbiotic relationship with our planet, and we must start to value that in very real ways.

sumber: http://pakobserver.net/

In April and May, two massive earthquakes in Nepal killed more than 8,400 people, injured 20,000 and reduced 300,000 houses to rubble. In March, Cyclone Pam destroyed homes, schools, infrastructure and livelihoods on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, affecting half the population, including 82,000 children. Both nations will take years to recover.

The number and severity of disasters is increasing (see 'Catastrophic rise'). Annual global economic losses from geophysical, hydro-meteorological and climatological events could almost double from their 2005 levels by 2030 to exceed US$300 billion if the past decade's trend continues. The figures may worsen as climate change, globalization, technological change, urbanization and political and economic instability put more people and assets at risk.

Improved disaster-risk management and resilience is essential for sustainable societies¹. But the science of natural hazards is too fragmented to influence policy effectively. Seismologists, for example, had long warned in specialist journals that Nepal's Kathmandu region was due a large earthquake. Local politicians did not strengthen construction codes, reinforce old buildings or inform the population about potential risks. Had such measures been implemented — as they have in Japan, California and Chile — the death toll would have been lower (see ‘Three lessons yet to be learned’). Similarly, structures in flood-prone areas can be elevated; those in cyclone zones wind-proofed; and the public educated about such possibilities.

Sadly, hazard mitigation is not a vote-winner. It pits long-range investments against short-term political cycles — even though it is cheaper to prevent losses than to rebuild after them^{2, 3}. Reinforcing the levees of New Orleans, Louisiana, against hurricane storm surges would have cost ten times less than rebuilding neighbourhoods after Hurricane Katrina. It is more politically expedient to respond afterwards when constituents are demanding assistance. Public awareness of the scale of disaster risks is hindered by the breadth and complexity of research, spanning the natural, social and health sciences, law, humanities and engineering.

In March, governments met under the auspices of the United Nations in Sendai, Japan, to negotiate an international agreement to reverse the rising trend of disaster losses. Unlike previous voluntary agreements, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 has set measureable targets. One goal is to lower average death rates and economic losses in 2020–30 relative to 2005–15 (by what percentage is not specified).

For the Sendai agreement to succeed, an open and comprehensive source of vetted information on disaster-risk reduction is needed. It would provide evidence for monitoring progress towards the goals. We call on the scientific community to set up an international assessment process to feed such information into disaster policy and practice.

Splintered approach

The community of disaster-risk researchers is small and splintered into disciplines that are focused on single natural hazards. Only recently have seismologists worked with geodesists to determine how changes in Earth's shape and gravity field apply loads to faults⁴. Disaster-medicine researchers rarely meet public-health professionals or read social-science journals⁵. Local or indigenous knowledge and the on-the-ground experiences of emergency managers and humanitarian agencies are often excluded.

Source: Munichre/Natcatservice

 

Governments need holistic solutions, not incremental proposals that solve one aspect but ignore wider ramifications. A move towards integrated disaster-risk research — bringing together disciplines to focus on particular problems and social needs — is filling this void⁶. But lack of a critical overview of what is known about disaster risk leaves politicians without guidance.

This is why early political efforts to reduce disaster losses foundered. The UN designated the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, and in 1999 created the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) to coordinate national efforts. In the absence of a legally binding treaty with targets, and consequences for not achieving them, UNISDR has been largely limited to promoting risk awareness and facilitating institutional development.

In 2005, some 168 countries signed up to the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), pledging to reduce disaster losses by 2015. Again, this did not occur. Of the ten costliest disasters between 1980 and 2014, those that happened after the agreement were more than four times as expensive as those in the decade before. Increased vulnerability and exposure account for some of the increase — but not all.

At least 35 nations, including Colombia, Brazil and India, now include disaster risk and reduction in their development strategies. Most do not. Many financial donors view disasters as interruptions in development, not as risks that need to be managed. Disaster-risk-assessment reports are too broad to guide municipalities and nations. For example, UNISDR's Global Assessment Reports or the World Economic Forum's Global Risks reports provide global and thematic overviews, often consider risks qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and neglect the collective impacts of personal choices such as whether to purchase insurance or relocate⁷.

The Sendai framework calls on governments to do four things: understand disaster risk; strengthen risk governance to manage risks across all sectors; invest in risk-reduction measures that promote resilience; and enhance disaster preparedness and responses so that nations “build back better” in their recovery. It tasks research networks with focusing on the root causes of disasters and probable emergent risks; supporting action by local communities and authorities; and engaging policy-makers.

Review mechanism

A coherent science-based assessment process for disaster-risk reduction should be created to provide sound knowledge to inform decision-making, and to assist governments worldwide in setting policies and goals and to identify research gaps. By taking an integrated approach, such an assessment would go beyond previous proposals for international panels on natural hazards and disasters⁸.

Disaster-risk reports should identify what is known and where there are gaps in our knowledge. They must summarize information relevant to the Sendai targets. And they should examine the root causes of vulnerabilities and exposure, the potential socio-economic impacts of natural hazards and the ways to reduce (if not prevent) human and economic losses. Finally, such an assessment should provide a mechanism for knowledge transfer from research to practice, ensuring that the science is useful, usable and used⁹.

A high-level, transdisciplinary body of international experts in disaster-risk reduction should be established by national governments and international organizations dealing with disaster risks, with input from various sectors and civil society. Such a body would have the reach and influence — from local communities, businesses and governments — to raise people's awareness. The same findings presented by an independent scientist or article would not.

The main practical difficulties will be in incorporating the field's diverse information and practices into an assessment, and demonstrating to policy-makers that it need not take a extreme event to cause catastrophic human consequences¹⁰. Government support for the process will be essential. Synergies must be found by combining and consolidating disaster-risk reduction efforts across UN institutions.

Disaster-risk management, climate change and sustainable development targets will need to be aligned. For example, there should be a coordinated assessment of the state of knowledge in disaster risk and its utility for supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Knowledge transfer will make community-based resilience efforts possible. Illuminating findings, best practices and state-of-the-art modelling must become part of the evidence-based strategy for disaster-risk reduction.

source: http://www.nature.com

THE METRO Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study of 2004 says that a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that will be generated by the 100-kilometer West Valley Fault will occur at any time. This will make Metro Manila the epicenter of this destructive earthquake, according to director Renato U. Solidum Jr. of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs).

Defense Secretary Voltaire T. Gazmin has emphasized that the Greater Metro Manila Area, including the adjacent regions of Central Luzon and Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon), comprising the economic, political, sociocultural and education hub of the Philippines and home to a third of its population, is transected by the West Valley Fault system.

This means that about 30 million people are residing or working in this crowded urbanized landscape. These people, composed of both ordinary citizens and civil and military personnel, will all be victims of the Big One.

This will present serious challenges to the response capability of both local and national governments because all their personnel will also be victims, and their facilities and equipment could be damaged or destroyed.

The Big One is projected to result in an intensity 8 earthquake that will produce widespread destruction, thousands of deaths and countless injuries. It is expected to bring down or damage the major bridges and other spans across the Pasig River and its many tributaries, creeks and esteros, which will physically separate and isolate the cities and communities in Metro Manila.

No power, phone service

The destructive ground shaking is expected to make roadways virtually impassable due to the toppling of giant billboards and utility poles. There will be no electrical power and landline communication and the cellular phone system will be seriously interrupted due to overloading of calls or text messages and damage to cell sites.

Monstrous traffic jams due to an expected blackout would result in road accidents if the Big One hits during an evening rush hour on a weekday.

Since the epicenter of the Big One will be the entire Metro Manila, everything located in the metropolis and the surrounding areas, and everyone living in all its barangays will be adversely affected.

Isolated

It must be emphasized that almost all of our communities have numerous utility poles. When these poles topple, entire communities and individual streets will be isolated.

Republic Act No. 10121, or the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (PDRRM) law, provides that the barangays are the first responders in the community.

However, the widespread destruction and blockage of roads will delay responders even at the barangay level. This is due to the fact that the barangay first responders will also be victims and will have to care for their families, gather their emergency teams and consolidate their undamaged resources before they can actually respond.

Prepare, organize

Therefore, Phivolcs emphasizes that individuals and families in each and every barangay must be prepared for the Big One.

Citizens must develop their own plans and organize before the disaster strikes, lest they find themselves alone, confused and helpless as individuals, as separate families, as neighbors or as a community. Families residing on the same street or cluster of streets must be self-reliant and must not rely on help from government as a substitute for self-reliance and sustainability.

There is therefore, a need for the citizens themselves to organize a Family-based Street Level Disaster Preparedness Program (FSLDPP). This must be based on a bottom-up plan in support of the Barangay Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan.

Objectives of FSLDPP

Develop, train, equip and manage families as frontliners before and during emergencies.

Develop and institutionalize a culture of disaster preparedness among families and neighbors.

Develop and institutionalize collaborative planning programs among neighbors and community stakeholders.

The initial action in developing an FSLDPP is to organize each home and all the members of the household by assigning emergency tasks.

INDIVIDUAL LEVEL

* Locate safe areas and identify hazards in the house.

* Assign emergency duties for every member of the household.

* Stock 14 days of food, water and medicine.

* Organize a “go bag” with a personal emergency and first aid kit for each member of the family with three days of food, clothing and toiletries.

* Designate several assembly areas if there is a need to evacuate the home.

STREET LEVEL

* Locate, inform and organize assets residing in each street, like physicians, nurses, pharmacists, health workers, caregivers, physical therapists, midwives, first aid providers, engineers, teachers, boy scouts and girl scouts, faith-based individuals, and active, retired and reservist military personnel as well as police and fire service personnel.

Emergency brigades

These individuals will play vital roles in the FSLDPP when we organize among all the residents of the street functional emergency brigades, such as food and water, evacuation, search and rescue, security and traffic control, medical control and information control.

A bottom-up FSLDPP must be developed among the residents because every street is unique in terms of population density, profile and physical configuration.

The program must likewise identify facilities like barangay hall, police and fire stations, hospitals, churches, malls, groceries, sari-sari stores, drug stores, hardware stores, car repair shops, funeral homes and open spaces that will be useful sources of shelter, food, water and emergency equipment.

(Brig. Gen. Marcelo B. Javier Jr. [reserve] is a management specialist by profession. He has been a volunteer reservist of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine Red Cross [PRC] since 1968. He is currently the commander of the Army’s 15th Infantry “Defender” Ready Reserve Division whose area of responsibility is Metro Manila. He is also the chair of the Disaster Management Service of PRC [Rizal chapter] and a trustee and executive director of Red Cross Muntinlupa.)