resilience starts with information
Resilience – A True Story
The storm brought widespread destruction, but it couldn’t wipe the smile from Daphne’s* face. I met Daphne during my visit to Mersan, a small village in southwest Haiti and a flashpoint for Hurricane Matthew, the worst storm to hit Haiti in half a century. Mersan is devastated. The town is littered with uprooted trees and the twisted tin remnants of roofs blown from houses. The landscape has changed forever, and with it the lives of thousands of families. The UN says that 1.4 million people need urgent life-saving assistance, a large number of them children. From the rubble, Daphne picks up two schoolbooks, calling them “a good catch.” I met this seven-year-old girl in Efakap de Mersan, the local secondary school. She has a shy…
Natural catastrophes and the protection gap
Given the reported increase in the frequency of natural catastrophes, we should ask how much progress we are making in reducing the impacts of these disasters? Our focus is often drawn to the number of houses inundated or villages destroyed by storm surge. How can we gain a perspective on what has been accomplished? Indeed, we are now at the start of the third UN-sponsored decade for natural disaster reduction, yet there is no process in place to measure the result of all these additional interventions: how many lives have been saved, how many houses were protected from flooding or kept their roofs during storms. I wrote the book The Cure for Catastrophe to try and answer this question and explore how we are doing in this quest to solve the challenge of natural disasters….