Driving Apollo's Horses

Here at the UNFCCC climate negotiations, the discussion about how to include disaster risk reduction in the negotiation text on adaptation is heated. When the section was first reviewed in the large-scale plenary there were parties who worked to minimize its place in the text. This springs from a nuanced discussion about compensation for the damage caused by climate change. While it seems both cost effective and responsible to add risk reduction to our adaptation strategies since it will prevent human suffering, there is a worry that it’s a way for developed countries to blame poor countries for the catastrophes that will happen and avoid paying for damages. It’s a touchy issue on both sides, to say the least.

At a side event yesterday here at the climate negotiations, the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR) presented their Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. They have analyzed disaster data since the 1950’s and it is clear that both mortality and economic losses are on the rise. There has been an increase in severe weather, but there is also an increase in non-weather damages. More people and assets are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The data reveals a complex picture. While mortality is driven by large events (the Asian tsunami, massive hurricanes) the vast majority of economic losses are driven by smaller scale, local events, most of which are weather related. The poor and small countries take the biggest long term hit when disaster strikes as the damages create a negative feedback with poverty, wiping out the meager resources of poor families and setting them back, sometimes for generations. Children from Hurricane Katrina refugees are still lagging their peers in school, for a parallel US example.

The authors identify three drivers for increasing risk; deficient urban and local governance, dependence on vulnerable, usually rural, livelihoods and declining ecosystem services. You’ll notice that climate change is not listed as a driver of increasing risk.  They identify it as a magnifier as opposed to a driver. Perhaps it seems semantic, but if you are a small island nation looking for compensation for loss of territory, as some 40 likely will be in the coming decades, the difference is important. It represents a difference in paradigm about risk. We cannot control the weather (though we could stop stacking the deck in the wrong direction) but we can limit our exposure or increase our resilience. The vast differences in mortality during an event (sometimes as great as 200 to 1) between developed countries with building codes, land use planning and functioning infrastructure and the sprawling informal settlements in the developing world with fragile housing stock built in wastelands with no infrastructure like drainage point to our ability to manage risk to save lives, despite climate change. Success stories like Bangladesh’s approach to flooding also highlight that wealth is not the deciding factor in accomplishing risk reduction.  However, this makes deciding who’s at fault for how much of the death and destruction, the local institutions or the wealthy polluters, impossible to sort out.

What struck me most about the event though was how this difference in viewpoint – that we all can take our own actions to reduce risk in our communities – is radically different from the discussion of adaptation to climate change impacts in the climate negotiations. Here, the developing world is portrayed as the victim of the selfish ravages of the developing world’s pollution, and to some extent, that’s true – our pollution is very much complicating development.  But in the Hyogo Framework for Action, which is the global agreement on disaster risk reduction that led to this report, developing countries are equal peers with the developed world. Rather than this deeply seated blame game, the disaster risk reduction paradigm gives countries autonomy.  They can make their citizens safer, their economies more resilient, without waiting around for an adaptation finance package or permission to get started from their donors or peers.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying and the actual negotiation and implementation of the Hyogo Framework was no simple matter.  But the difference in paradigm highlighted for me the caustic nature of frame that the climate negotiation operates within. I’m still convinced that our pollution is causing damage and we need to both radically decrease it and pay something for the inevitable damage. But it’s unhelpful to treat developing country governments as either blameless, since they have a responsibility and a self-interest to protect their populations, or helpless, since they can control to a greater or lesser degree, the drivers of increasing risk.

As the global community develops a framework for adaptation, it’s important to ensure that those who are most vulnerable maintain autonomy and are not considered helpless children, either to make a moral case or to ensure a flow of finance. They are full-fledged partners in building the sustainable world we need to all survive and thrive in the coming years.