‘Tacloban Declaration': From where to where?

This is my response to the ‘Tacloban Declaration' (TD) initiative that the President of Philippines Mr. Benigno Aquino III has embarked upon to address disaster risk reduction based on the experience of Haiyan.

The President of Philippines Mr. Benigno Aquino III has embarked upon a timely but ambitious initiative of coming up with a ‘Tacloban Declaration' to address disaster risks as an outcome of Asia-Europe Meeting Manila Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management which has just finished in Manila (4-6 June 2014).

Going by the face value, we should judge this initiative as a very good one, probably the first time ever a developing Asian country thought of coming up with a major declaration addressing disaster risks. Traditionally, it has always been Japan which has taken leadership among Asian countries when it comes to either environmental initiatives or disaster risk reduction or climate change. The president’s initiative is also very timely considering that the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) will expire in 2015. However, probably this is where the gala of praise ends.

The Conference Center in Kobe where the HFA took a shape in 2005

.       Who are the Players: The major question raises is the critical mass that is required to launch an initiative like this. At ASEM 2015, what we are looking at is a small fraction of the World DRR experts participating in this venture (around 150 government officials, academics and policy makers) compared to the broad representation based on which the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) was designed. Long preparation, credibility of the forum etc. made HFA distinctive and appealing. When HFA was drafted, the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction was attended by hundreds of practitioners, government officials and academics engaged in DRR representing most countries. For example, the WCDR 2005 consisted of intergovernmental segment participated by nearly 160 governments, thematic segments and public forum and the discussions from all these segments were culminated into what is called HFA. So, to replace HFA, we need equally or more thorough process.

2.       History matters but it has more to it: HFA was built upon the Yokohama strategy (1994) which was more of guidelines for natural disaster preparedness, prevention and mitigation and focused on enhancing national and local capabilities to manage and reduce risk. The Yokohama Strategy taught us a lesson that such processes require greater involvement of local communities in all aspects of DRR, scarcity of resources from development budgets etc. As a consequence, what HFA did was to address all the lessons that YS has taught us. This takes me to my next observation.

3.       The devil is in the details: Now, I am saying this without much details on how ASEM will handle in terms of bringing in all the experiences we had since 2005, what would be the coverage of this declaration (or regional or global) and what preparations have gone into it including considering consultations that are already happening for feeding into designing the post-HFA process. The UNISDR has already started online consultations and has already come up with several thematic papers to inputs to design the post-HFA mechanism. It would be good to know if ASEM has already taken these inputs into consideration for coming up with the declaration.

4.       It is players again: Even if a well worded TD comes out of the ASEM 2015, what is the guarantee that it will be adopted by all the nation states and what would be its status under UN? What about the needed finances? Would TD be able to secure needed finances to push its agenda or it will remain as yet another declaration?

5.       Where we want to see the declaration going? As for me, I strongly believe that the Tacloban Declaration be supportive of the post-HFA process, contribute to it rather than duplicate it and help in pulling consensus for coming up with a strong and effective post-HFA process? Did the president had this in his mind when he supported the idea of coming up with Tacloban Declaration declaration is the question to be answered. 

Hidden Vulnerabilities of Asian Cities and Climate Change: Shattering the Myths

SVRK Prabhakar, IGES, Japan

Having come from a rural background, I always had fascinating impression about cities: they are cool, trendy, fashionable, provide better quality of life, have better infrastructure and one can be what they want to be because of multitude of opportunities they provide. No doubt, cities are engines of economic growth for as much as I have seen with no exception. No wonder, they continue to attract the best of the skills available around and far from them. Well, they do have a down side as well. Because they were attracting all the talent, the rural areas are deprived of the skillful human resources and hence have not grown economically as much as their urban counterparts could grow. Part of the problem is to blame the growth center approach, where governments encouraged some areas, cities, to grow at the cost of other areas, villages. The idea is to concentrate the investments at few places and cross-subsidize other areas from the revenue generated. While we were successful in achieving rapid expansion of growth centers, we failed in distributive policies. As a result, rural areas have suffered the most. However, the topic of this blog post is not about how cities failed other areas but how they failed themselves! Time and again the vulnerability assessments have shown that most cities have high vulnerabilities in infrastructure, social and political aspects while few others have economic vulnerabilities. And this has very high relevance when climate change is to impact cities as much as the rural areas, including the ones on coasts. Mind you, most major cities are situated on the coasts, nearly 20% of global population lives on coasts in some of the most populated cities. With nearly 70% of the coastline worldwide are projected to be impacted by the sea level rise, these cities are put to enormous risks of flooding and related losses. Add this to the extreme rainfall events that cities may receive. From this context, there are at least three myths I think need to be busted that have relevance to our collective efforts for comprehensive risk reduction.

Picture: Right or left?

Myth buster I: Rural areas are best fit for food security and livelihood studies!

Not true (well, true if you look at the number of food security and livelihood studies coming from rural areas)! Despite my fascinating views about cities, cities have not vindicated much of my impression about them and that is because the urban governance structures have failed to identify and address vulnerabilities that are seeping below their carpet. Need any evidence? Just take the example of 2008 global food crisis. The research by WFP and others has proven that the urban poor were the most effected during the food crisis. As much as 50-70% of the urban poor representing casual and unskilled laborers experienced a net decline of food intake by 10-15% in most cities they have studied. In addition, the global food crisis has also impacted the livelihoods of petty traders, laborers and peri-urban agriculturists etc. Does this sound any logical? People talk about rural poor when issues like food security and livelihoods come up in the discussion, it never, well almost, occurred to most that it is the bottom strata of urban populace that is probably even more vulnerable than their rural brothers and sisters. It is no brainer that urban poor spend large part of their income on food compared to the rural poor due to relatively high cost of living in urban areas.

Myth buster II: Floods happen only in rural areas!

Well, at least this is what we visualize from most part of watching television: we imagine floods as vast stretch of farm lands inundated by water with folks on their rooftops (blame the media for creating this mental picture?). Not anymore! The 2005 Mumbai floods and 2011 Bangkok floods should completely change this mental picture. These events have clearly shown the problem with our current model of urban development: badly planned infrastructure, blocked natural drainage, and encroachments in the flood plains. We pretended to solve these problems by creating temporary engineering solutions rather than thinking larger and into the future. Whom to be blamed? the poorly staffed urban planning departments or the uncontrolled rural to urban migration or haphazard planning and communication systems of city governments? Studies have time and again indicated how poor the governments were in communicating risks to their city dwellers and how reluctant the insurance companies are to provide affordable flood and fire insurance. Probably the blood is on everybody’s hands. You will be wrong if you think the actual culprits are governments. As is evident from Bangkok floods, even corporations, whom we know as the most risk aware entities on the planet, have ignored the possible flood risks and have installed high-tech manufacturing facilities in flood prone areas and bore the brunt of floods and billion dollar losses.

Myth buster III: Levees are the best means of dealing with coastal floods!

Not true! This point has become very clear from repeated coastal disasters that levees often fail to live to the expectations. The research has clearly indicated how deceptive levees could be in making people believe that they are fully protected, creating a false sense of security. We know that the households living along dykes are the least to heed to any kind of early warning. Despite this, governments continue to argue for dykes and levees than putting strict land use regulations in place.

The big elephant(s) in the room!

We say it is often the big elephant this is ignored in the room and in urban room I see several elephants (after all cities are big!). We are still to come to terms with the dilemma of growing vertical vs horizontal, our current models of eco cities have failed to deliver the promise of reducing external resource dependence for food and water and cities continue to swell by uncontrolled migrants living under sub-par living conditions and dignity than rural areas offer.

If you ask me ‘is everything about urban areas so bad?’, then I would say no! Not at least from the point of view of our fight against global warming. Research has shown that urban areas can provide some of the best means of maximizing GHG mitigation with relatively large adaptation co-benefits. Among other things, this especially comes from managing water consumption and demand such that urban areas can make meaningful contribution to the food-water-energy nexus more than any other single solution (I am not exaggerating). Cities can offer more if we can answer these questions:

Q1. How to make cities closed loop systems (in terms of resource dependence). Cities today have grown so big that their presence is felt hundreds and thousands of miles away from them. Are we practical in seeking cities to be closed loop systems? Probably this question needs to be rephrased and re-emphasized differently.

Q2. How to uncover hidden vulnerabilities to make cities resilient? I will bet that we have more things to learn about cities than we think we need to learn and it is the hidden vulnerabilities that make cities an unknown in the equation of risk reduction. The sad part is we are learning about these hidden variables only after a devastating event. We certainly need more brainstorming than the storms we are going to face!

Q3. How and when cities will be forward looking? I expect most cities may have already started looking into the future since this question is more relevant to cities than any other places we live in and probably part of this question is linked to the dilemma of whether to go for vertical or horizontal. We know that city governments are lost in day-to-day matters and not even the strategic planning departments have time to think strategically. The city planning exercises outsourced  to consultants seldom touch the probable reality of the nearest possible future!

Let me end this ramble with a hope that cities will soon move away from incremental and short term engineering solutions to transformative social approaches which is where most solutions to our problems are hidden!

Don’t agree with me? Drop a line below! 

[Based on a talk delivered at Coastal Cities: Risks from Climate Change and Natural Hazards October 5, 2013; Room 510, Kyoto International Conference Center, Japan. The presentation is available at http://pub.iges.or.jp/modules/envirolib/view.php?docid=4747].

アジア農村地域の産業振興 成功例と課題

This article is also posted in English at my previous blog post.

Source: 月刊ビジネスアイエネコ（2012年3月号）日本工業新聞社

GMS Countries and Early Warning Systems in the Context of Food-Water-energy Nexus

Suggested citation: Prabhakar, S.V.R.K. 2011. Climate Risks to Agriculture/Food Security in the GMS Countries and Early Warning Systems in the Context of Food-Water-energy Nexus. International Conference on GMS 2020: Balancing Economic Growth and  Environmental Sustainability, 2011, 15 - 16 November 2011, Hotel Plaza Athénée, Bangkok. Working Group on Environment (WGE) and Asian  Development Bank (ADB).

Abstract:

The Greater Mekong Subregion has undergone a rapid economic growth over the past decade with positive impacts on the human development and negative impacts on the environment and natural resources. The growing demand for energy in the region and high fuel prices during 2008 has seen several countries declaring ambitious biofuel strategies from which they retreated covertly later on. This has set a debate on nexus between food, water, and energy in the region. Though the biofuels fever has died down sooner than expected, there are chances for reemergence of debate over food-water-energy due to several traditional and non-traditional pressures discussed in this paper that include increasing energy demand, population growth, urbanization, changing life styles, and climate change. Early warning systems can play a crucial role in averting situations like 2008 fuel and food prices. However, there are several bottlenecks to be overcome that include lack of infrastructure and capacity for implementing such EWS. In addition to EWS, this paper discusses some traditional off-the-shelf policies such as general improvement in resource use efficiency in agriculture, water and energy sector, increasing energy supply through renewable sources, and creating a East-Asian Energy Community or a grid that could ease the food-water-fuel nexus in the region to a greater extent. 

Some Excerpts from the Above Paper:

An Early Warning System (EWS) in the context of food-water-energy nexus can be defined as a collection of dependent and independent variables that lead to detection and assessment of impending problem based on feedback connections operating between demand and supply of food, water and energy. A EWS can be as simple as that of a collection of indicators that can provide an early warning to the policy makers and other development planners operating at various levels. It can also be as complex as that of employing dynamic simulation models that can quantitatively represent the real world based on the conditions defined/assumed within the model (the system). A recent example of EWSs for policy decisions can be the EU proposal for building an EWS for energy that simulates the supply and demand situation in the region (European Union, 2009), which includes early warning for long-term energy conditions as well as to handle short supply in oil in short-time scales.

An effective EWS can be built using dynamic simulation models since they can consider the element of time and related dynamics in determining the status of outcomes that could be useful to the policy makers. The use of simulation models in the public policy research is not new. Some examples include:

·         The General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) has provided good tool in understanding environment and economics into a single framework.

·         The Asia-Pacific Integrated Model (AIM) has provided a tool to simulate the impact of climate change on natural environment and socio-economics the Asia-Pacific region.

·         Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have been used for understanding the economy-wide impacts of policies.

·         Multi-regional input-output (MRIO) models have been employed to understand and forecast material flows across different regions.

All the above simulation models are largely used for research purposes that have partially contributed to development of policies rather than for providing real-time early warning for policy purposes. Partially, this could be attributed to the limited understanding of natural, socio-economic and institutional systems.

2.1. Prerequisites for development of an EWS

Development of EWS is dependent on various factors related to the system in question and it has to do with how best the EWS can represent the real world.

Determinants of an effective EWS:

•  How the system is defined (what components a system constitutes),
• Understanding of relationships and feedback connections operating between different actors/components of the system,
• The precision with which these dynamic and static forces are quantified and represented in the model, and
•  Interpretation of the outcomes of the model as against what it actually mean with implications for the institutions that use the EWS for policy purposes.

2.2. What an EWS should be able to do?

The end result of developing the decision support system for early warning related to food-water-energy should be able to:

1.       visualize demand and supply situation of food, water and energy in the region on short- medium- and long-term basis,

2.       give projections on prices of food, water and energy on immediate and long-term basis so that countries can take preventive and proactive strategies,

3.       help policy makers at various levels to plan appropriate crops, water usage and water conservation practices and how energy is produced and consumed at the regional and national scales,

4.       help in appropriate allocation of resources for food and energy production while keeping in view several constraints such as environmental health, climate change, food prices, and sustainability of resources employed, and

5.       help develop a set of standard operational procedures to be invoked in the wake of a situation like 2008 energy and food crisis.

Contact: For an extended article, please contact the author....

Risk insurance in the Asia Pacific Region: How the processes under UNFCCC can help?

This is not a full article. Read the full article available here.

Summary
Risk insurance can provide an effective means of catastrophic risk reduction and climate change adaptation in the developing countries. The ongoing discussions by the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are putting substantial efforts to promote climate change adaptation through international cooperation in the form of providing additional finances and technologies including proposals to promote a global or regional climate risk insurance facility. Case studies from within and outside the Asia-Pacific region provide valuable lessons which could be used for promoting risk insurance by the future climate regime (post-Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012). The analysis of these risk insurance proposals to the Convention and comparison of what they intend to achieve with that of the existing issues within the risk insurance sector in the developing Asia-Pacific indicate that these proposals address some of the major issues that are limiting the spread of risk insurance. However, no single proposal is comprehensive enough to address all the issues and all the proposals lack details in terms of how they can achieve what they intend to achieve. There is a need for the proposals to the Convention to give more thought on how they address the issues such as high base risks, lack of historical data required for designing risk insurance systems, limited awareness in the utility of insurance instruments, keeping the premium prices within affordable levels, encouraging the role of private sector, enabling greater access to reinsurers, and instituting enabling policies to create a proactive risk mitigation environment with an eye on sustainability. A convergence approach wherein the proposals incorporate lessons from on-the-ground experiences from regional, national and local initiatives could provide an effective model for promoting the risk insurance.

.........Not a full article......

The natural and man-made hazards have historically undermined the developmental gains across the world. The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable regions to a range of primary hydro-meteorological natural hazards such as storms, floods, and droughts. The data from EM-DAT suggest that the number of hydro-meteorological natural disasters has been increasing at an average annual rate of 217% over the past 40 years in the Asia-Pacific region (EM-DAT, 2010).

 In the region, the total human lives lost due to disasters were 3729 with estimated damage costs of 11.54 billion USD in 2009. Similar increase in the number of catastrophic natural disasters and related losses was also reported by Munich Re according to which both the insured and uninsured losses have been increasing over the years.

Climate change has brought an additional dimension to disaster risks in the Asia-Pacific region as it is projected to exacerbate the intensity and magnitude of various natural hazards such as storms, high-intensity rainfall events, heat waves, floods and droughts. Especially, the projections suggest high probability for an increasing trend in the high-intensity and low probability events (IPCC, 2007; Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan, 2007). These increased catastrophic risks will further undermine the developmental gains already made in the Asia-Pacific region.

Taking agricultural sector as an example, being one of the highly vulnerable sectors in the region, farming communities are in particular at greater risk due to weather related crop failures. Often, farmers borrow loans from local banks prior to the cropping season. However, farmers, banks, and governments are put at higher financial risk due to increasing frequency of crop failures, and often governments are forced to waive the loans. In case of India, estimates suggest that the government waived off crop loans worth 16 billion USD in 2008 alone (Srinivasan, 2008). Similar incidences are observed across other countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Sompo Japan Insurance Inc., 2010).

Hence, in order to address additional risks brought by the impact of climate change, there is a need to relook at and reframe the current risk reduction strategies especially in terms of development and utilization of risk spreading instruments within the Asia-Pacific region. This working paper reviews the current status of risk insurance and identifies emerging issues and experiences. These issues and experiences are applied to various risk insurance proposals made by the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC for assessing the extent to which they consider experiences to address issues for promoting the risk insurance.

The concept of risk transfer or risk spreading entails that the individual (the insured) risks be reduced by spreading or transferring the risks from the insured to the insurance provider (the insurer) since the insurer is in a stronger financial position than the insured (Njegomir and Maksimovic, 2009). The insurance provider is able to insure the risks of the insured largely due to the fact that the insurer obtains premiums from a large number of insured who are at different levels of risks by making sure that the total amount of premiums collected are far greater than or exceeds the underwriting of risks (termed as law of large numbers). Insurance agencies in turn underwrite some of these risks with reinsurance firms that provides needed buffer against catastrophic event related losses. In sum, the risk insurance scheme functions as part of the social security net through risk transfer mechanism and thereby contribute to build the resilience of vulnerable societies.

Risk transfer has been widely advocated as one of the best means of risk mitigation across the world (Arnold, 2008; Siamwalla and Valdes, 1986; Swiss Re, 2010) due to several advantages it provides:

 

·         Promotes emphasis on risk mitigation compared to the current response-driven mechanisms.

·         Provides a cost-effective way of coping financial impacts of climate and weather induced hazard events.

·         Supports the climate change adaptation by covering the residual risks uncovered by the other risk reduction mechanisms.

·         Stabilizes rural incomes and hence reduce the adverse effects on income fluctuation and socio-economic development.

·         Provides opportunities for public-private partnerships.

·         Reduced burden on government resources for post-disaster relief and reconstruction.

·         Helps communities and individuals to quickly renew and restore the livelihood activity.

·         Depending on the way the insurance is designed, the insurance mechanism can address a wide variety of risks emanating from climatic and non-climatic sources.

Read full paper available here.