Reimagining disaster response
Climate scientists foresee the 1.5 degree tipping point to occur by the end of this decade. In 2020, global temperatures had already increased by 1.2 degrees. Current estimates also predict that despite all net zero commitments around the world, positive change will not be visible before 2060. Until then, millions are likely to suffer because of climate disasters.
There has been a rise in private sector investment and civil society mobilisation around disasters in the last few years. The national budget for disaster relief has also been stepped up. Infrastructure like the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the State Disaster Response Force has been established. Despite this, the adverse impacts of disasters outpace the capacity of the system to respond. If the current trends continue, at least 300 million Indians would be at risk of climate-induced disasters by 2030. The current models of relief-centred response cannot meet this dynamic challenge.
Since 1994, we at SEEDS have had one goal: building the resilience of people exposed to disasters and climate change impacts. We have enabled this through practical solutions for disaster readiness, response and rehabilitation. We keep asking ourselves, how can we be better prepared? How can civil society, governments and markets combine our efforts to best enable at-risk communities?
One way to build resilience at scale and with speed is by expanding the role of communities in disaster management.
In India for example, we still follow a top-down disaster relief model. The government assesses the damage and rolls out a fixed relief budget. The civil society and market players don’t have visibility to these assessments. It is a century-old, colonial model from the times of the great famine, when it was implemented to assess loss in tax revenue from agriculture. But a top-down model neglects local needs and undermines community knowledge. Communities, if empowered, can be the first responders. They can become agents of recovery instead of passive victims waiting for someone else to solve their problems.
At the same time, we must stop treating disasters as a one-time event which can be addressed by offering immediate relief. Relief assistance may offer succour for the first few days, but it does not build capacity in communities to recover, rebuild and prepare for future disasters. For us to be able to sustain disaster management in its truest sense, recovery and resilience have to be treated with as much importance as relief.
There are challenges at multiple levels: the challenge of exponential growth in losses, the challenge of society’s inability to recuperate from repeated losses, and the challenge of a disaster response system which has not updated with time. It’s time to pause, reframe and reimagine.
Manage risk not disasters
We need to rethink how the current system responds to disasters. In contrast to the conventional ‘command and control’, we need a bottom-up model that involves communities as active participants. This would mean a change in the roles that communities, government, civil society and markets play today, and a change in the infrastructure that supports them.
This is our reimagined view of how sustainable change in a resilient society looks like in future.
Role of communities
As against a government-led model of assessing loss and recovery, communities should exercise agency to manage their own assessment and recovery in a dignified way.
As an example, if their home is destroyed in a flood, they should take part in assessing the extent and nature of loss, co-create the reconstruction of their home, choose the best design and building material from available resources, and be able to rebuild as per their needs, priorities and aspirations.
Communities as active participants can:
- Shape the assistance they require
- Build back better as they can access solutions to adapt and mitigate changes in their own natural and built environment
- Enhance their ability to anticipate future events and prepare accordingly
Role of Civil Society, Governments, and Markets
When communities themselves are owners of recovery, external stakeholders play complementary roles: governments make enabling policies, the private sector provides technical expertise and resources and local NGOs provide hand-holding support in recovery.
To restore the agency of communities living in disaster prone areas we have to reimagine how diverse actors work together with the community.
Building Enabling Infrastructure
Tackling these complex, mutating challenges would mean availability of multiple context-sensitive and need-based solutions. Technology can enable this change by making affected communities more discoverable, eligible and capable, triggering optimum in-time support. Here are 3 levels that this infrastructure could work:
Create a disaster e-wallet
The disaster e-wallet registers what people own today and lets them record their losses during a disaster. Instead of an outsider/government doing the assessment that may be ineffective, the community assesses the loss together. The wallet will capture loss of family-held assets such as homes including household articles, crops, livestock etc. through smart devices. Families can also record their sentiments through voice and video that is translatable to machine interpretable loss data using AI. Once created, an e-wallet can show a credit every time assistance comes in, and likewise ‘debits’ with every subsequent disaster related loss. It will also have the mechanism to verify the credibility of this data through attestation by other community members and further certification by a government appointed local official.
Loss data platform
The data stored on the wallet will help build a Loss Data Platform that captures community assessed losses, and uses secondary data, such as geographical vulnerability, to create actionable insights – who needs what, where and when. It will help the government, humanitarian institutes and markets to direct relief, resilience and recovery aid to the right people at the right time. Aid-givers and solution providers benefit from improved effectiveness and efficiency of aid distribution whereas communities gain from relevant and expeditious support. The platform leads to orchestration and match-making of multiple aid-givers on one side and affected communities on the other.
Open data
Making the loss data OPEN can generate many possibilities of innovation for programming loss recovery for affected people. Over time this data can predict future events and their impacts based on machine learning and use of artificial intelligence. These possibilities offer exciting opportunities for technology based organisations and development sector players to augment their capacity as well.
This approach is akin to that of Google Maps. It’s a cartographic repository of local as well as global knowledge. While the platform lays the base for such knowledge to come together and expand, it is the local communities who contribute to it that lend to its credibility and reach.
The future
The time has come for disaster response systems to reconfigure their functions and put the community at the centre. Building resilience is the only sustainable way forward. The more we invest in it now, the less we will have to spend recurrently and increasingly on disaster relief.
On this journey of 28 years of serving disaster affected communities and reaching 6 million people, as SEEDS pivots from being an implementer to an orchestrator, we look forward to working with a larger ecosystem of innovators who will re-imagine this system with us and help build resilient communities.
