The Asian Tsunami: Two Years Later

By Peter McCawley, Dean ADBI

A translated version of this article appeared in the Asahi-Shinbun on 26 December 2006.

Almost two years have passed since an earthquake in deep waters off the coast of Indonesia caused the tsunami that brought devastation to countries from Indonesia to Africa.

The memory is now fading for the international community. However, for the hundreds of thousands of survivors in the affected countries the memories are still raw.

The damage, most of which occurred in just a few short minutes, was immense. Almost 230,000 people were either killed or are missing, presumed dead, following the tsunami on 26 December 2004. More than 1.7 million people were displaced. Over $10 billion in damage was caused to infrastructure, houses and other property.

Source: Tsunami Evaluation Coalition

The first news of the immense scale of the disaster took time to spread. The worst-affected area, in Aceh at the northern tip of Indonesia, was hard to reach so it took time for accurate reports to reach the outside world. But as more details of the climbing death toll in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and other hard-hit countries began to arrive, disaster relief agencies in many countries responded quickly.

Following the urgent allocation of emergency funding in the first few days both local and international aid teams began to arrive to provide immediate help. At the global level major appeals for large-scale financial assistance were launched with the result that individuals, national governments and others throughout the world pledged a total of over $14 billion to assist with relief and reconstruction. Japan was one of the first countries to respond with emergency aid.

Raising $14 billion is one thing -- but spending it well is another. In the weeks and months that followed, numerous official agencies and hundreds of non-government organisations supported thousands of different activities in the tsunami-ravaged countries to help local communities rebuild their lives. But how effective has all of this work been? What lessons have been learned so far?

Useful answers to these key questions are provided in a valuable study released recently by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC)* based in London. The TEC is a loose coalition of over 40 key aid and government agencies, including JICA and MoFA from Japan, which joined together to judge how effective their combined work in providing tsunami relief has been.

Summarising the report, former U.S. President Bill Clinton who is currently UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery noted that the document contained an "honesty of analysis" which "includes both praise and uncomfortable reading". He listed three main messages.

The first message was that "we must do better at utilizing and working alongside local structures". This, really, was a diplomatic way of saying that too often, international agencies (and some non-government organisations as well) arrive to provide assistance after a disaster but fail to work closely with local communities. This approach sometimes leads to sharp disagreements.

"With nothing but good intentions, the international community descends into crisis situations in enormous numbers and its activities too often leave the very communities we are there to help on the sidelines", President Clinton said. The second main message emphasised the importance of investing in risk reduction and programs to support risk preparedness, especially at the local level. There is a need to "invest much more" in these measures so that local communities are ready to cope with emergency situations at short notice.

This is a lesson which is well-understood in Japan. Japan is already a world-leader in having disaster-preparedness systems in place and has valuable experience to share with other countries where natural disasters are common. But unfortunately, many developing countries are often unable to set aside funds to prepare for disasters and are thus unable to cope when a disaster strikes.

The third message was "the need to translate good intentions into meaningful reform". The same conclusion was expressed more directly by Jan Egeland, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, when he spoke at the launch of the TEC report. Egeland recalled that a similar major report had been prepared after the humanitarian emergency in Rwanda ten years earlier but that too often, many of the same mistakes continued to be made again and again when new emergencies arose.

The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) based in Tokyo has also been undertaking research into the effectiveness of the post-tsunami recovery programs in several countries in Asia as well. The first set of results for Sri Lanka was prepared in cooperation with the Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo. These results reinforced the conclusions from the TEC report, pointing to both important successes and useful lessons.

One of the most encouraging successes in Sri Lanka was that despite the fact that Sri Lanka had no previous experience of such a devastating tsunami, local institutions responded well when the crisis struck. Medical aid, food, and other relief supplies were mobilized at the local level within a day. Communities joined together to work across social barriers that had divided them for decades.

Sri Lanka's well-known record in the developing world for maintaining good public health standards also paid off. The effective public system combined with strong community awareness of basic hygienic practices ensured that there were no major disease outbreaks.

Three other key lessons emerged from the Sri Lankan experience. One is the overriding need for governments and communities to respond quickly when disasters strike. Too often, relief and rehabilitation programs take months, and sometimes years, to be drawn up and implemented. Delays of this sort are unacceptable.

Another lesson is that valuable time is often lost if donor and relief agencies try to over-plan their assistance activities. Often the fastest and most effective way of helping with relief is the simplest ? following the provision of essential emergency supplies such as food and medical relief, immediate cash payments can be very effective. Payments of this kind provide survivors with immediate support and cuts through bureaucratic tape. ADBI's Sri Lanka study concluded that particularly for poorer victims in an emergency situation, "cash grants are vital".

A third is that reconstruction costs are likely to soar. If there is a building boom in a local area, which is often the case after a disaster when houses, schools, roads and bridges need to be repaired, local building costs can rise rapidly. In Sri Lanka, construction costs often rose by 40-60% or more. The same thing happened in Aceh in Indonesia after the tsunami, and in the Yogyakarta area in Central Java after the earthquake last May when even bamboo poles quickly doubled in prices in some places.

The result is that unless planners allow for substantial increases in building costs, preliminary estimates of the funds needed for reconstruction after disasters are likely to be too low.

The memories of the terror of the tsunami of December 2004 still haunt hundreds of thousands of people across Asia. But if governments and communities across the world at least learn lessons from the relief efforts in the region, Asian countries will be better prepared to cope with future disasters.?

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