13th October, 2009

TIM COSTELLO

South-East Asia has been in the boxing ring - over a fortnight, blow after blow landed on communities from Indonesia and Samoa to the Philippines, Vietnam and India. More than a thousand people have died, and millions of families have been affected.

During all of this upheaval and devastation, negotiators from around the world were meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, trying to forge a path towards a global compact that will effectively address the worst impacts of climate change.

While we are unable to point to any particular weather event and say; “That is definitely due to climate change”, most studies point in one direction: that floods, typhoons, cyclones will be more intense and more frequent, seasons more unpredictable and droughts longer. Climate change does not cause earthquakes and tsunamis, but the measures that can cut their impacts - replanting hillsides with trees to reduce landslides and renewing coastal mangroves - also play a part in trimming atmospheric CO2.

The world responds when calamity strikes: out of common humanity, of dignity, and out of our own interests in ensuring that nations of the world do not lurch into instability and crisis. The question is, will we choose to invest more now, dramatically reducing our emissions and partnering with communities to help them adapt to a changed climate, or will we leave our children to become the “rescue” generation, funding ever-expanding relief efforts?

The poorest countries are already in those parts of the world most exposed to climate change. In these countries, the poorest are driven to live in vulnerable circumstances. These families get the crumbling riverbanks or steep hillsides, unproductive land or floodplains. Tenure is fragile. So the impacts of wild weather is worst in the poorest communities.

What we know is that two things can help: improving health resources and building local economic resilience means families are better able to cope with sudden shocks; and preparing communities for the risks from flooding, storms, or droughts makes a difference to the number of lives lost and to people's ability to recover from trauma.

Last week I was in Indonesia, in and around Padang in West Sumatra, where the quake destroyed buildings at the centre of a city of 1 million people. In many of the surrounding villages, close to the quake's epicentre, the impact was at times more severe. Whole communities were washed away in landslides. In Kampung Timabung, Mrs Darli told me her story through tears and showed me her flattened house. She and her six children escaped with their lives, but with no home, no insurance or ability to pay for reconstruction. This is the powerlessness of poverty.

At the UN climate change talks in Bangkok, World Vision launched its report Reduce Risk and Raise Resilience. The message is clear: communities in developing nations need our support now to prepare for emergencies, and the best preparation is helping them to escape from poverty.

In May last year, I witnessed Cyclone Nargis enter the history books as one of the deadliest cyclones of all times. It went from a Category 1 to a Category 4 cyclone in 24 hours as it picked up energy from unusually warm ocean waters. People told me a cyclone like this was unprecedented. With a death toll of more than 140,000, the people of Myanmar were in shock and disbelief. Disaster events cannot always be prevented, but their risk can be significantly reduced.

A warming world makes reducing risk and raising resilience increasingly indispensable.

Development agencies now respond to more requests for relief than ever. At World Vision we estimate the costs of our relief operations - which cuts into our ability to invest in long term sustainable development work - will rise significantly. In the 10 years to 2008, relief spending went from $90 million to $644 million, and more than doubled as a proportion of World Vision's costs to 35 per cent. By 2020, on this trend, we would be spending 60 per cent of funds or about $3 billion a year on emergency relief.

So we are working to refit our community development programs with measures to adapt and prepare for change. For example, in the Quang Ngai province of Vietnam, we partner with 10 communities to diversify farmers' incomes, educating families about emergencies, and preparing buildings. Foundations have been raised, beams fortified, roofing tied down or replaced, and walls strengthened to make houses more resistant to the impact of storms and floods. The reports last week following the trail of Typhoon Ketsana across Vietnam were that few deaths were recorded in these districts.

Providing finance for adaptation - helping communities prepare for more severe storms, longer droughts, more tropical disease - ought to have minimal overlap with existing official development assistance. Australia should provide leadership on how this finance will be provided.

World leaders need to emerge from Copenhagen in December with a deal that effectively cuts emissions globally, in a fair way, and which provides substantial additional funding to the least developed communities who will otherwise suffer the effects brought about by a market failure of the West - the failure to properly price the costs of greenhouse gas emissions.

Tim Costello is chief executive of World Vision Australia. This article was first published in The Age newspaper.