This week's strong earthquake that shook Japan, one of the best prepared Asian countries for natural disasters, was a stark reminder of the value of readiness in a region disproportionately targeted by the forces of nature.
While Japan continues to dig out from last year's triple disaster, Thailand is scrambling to avert a repeat of last year's historic floods.
Since then, Thai authorities have set aside billions of dollars for a long-term water resource management plan that they say will ensure that the disaster will not be repeated.
Bangkok resident Suthi Sun remembered the floods like a bad dream. When the waters reached his residence, he said in an e-mail interview that "this was the first time I found the high level of flooding. The highest level was 1.5 meter[s]. Meanwhile my ceiling is about 2.2 to 2.5 meters."
Sun said the Thai government tried to do its best but had no "clear or certain policy." Ruengrawee Pichaikul, Senior Program Coordinator for the Asia Foundation in Thailand, agreed, saying in an e-mail interview that some believed the scale of the flooding was beyond the government's capacity.
When responding to similar charges leveled against the government during the flood, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said, "I tell you the truth, we have done everything to the best of our ability."
"We are facing the most severe flooding ever. We need encouragement, support and cooperation from all sectors and from all the people as well," she said.
Thai authorities have also set up a disaster fund to compensate victims and are struggling to provide affordable insurance to vulnerable citizens. Similar efforts are underway in the Philippines to provide victims of a recent earthquake with insurance and compensation.
USAID's Principle Regional Advisor William Berger underscored the importance of disaster preparedness, particularly building resilient infrastructure, which can be costly. "It pays to invest in disaster risk reduction. Having...buildings built to a code that meets the threats that the country is facing is absolutely critical."
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Nepal sits on the collision point of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates that created the Himalayas. Cornell University's Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Larry Douglas Brown said major earthquakes will re-occur there "because the two plates are continuing to come together."
"The fact that they occur close to the population centers puts them at risk," he said. "And I say that also the complicating factor is that the resources are either not available or have not been applied to protect the infrastructure that exists there against these large earthquakes.
One possibility, said Steven Rood, the Asia Foundation Country Representative for the Philippines and the Pacific Island Nations, is to turn Nepal's historical structures into tourist attractions and use those revenues to retrofit them to withstand seismic activity. That is the approach USAID has used since 1995. The U.S. agency has helped build government and community capacity to reduce disaster risk and foster public partnerships to reconstruct old buildings and turn them into tourist attractions.
Japan, meanwhile, has invested heavily in being ready for the worst that nature can offer up. Berger was in Tokyo 24 hours after the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck.
"I sat in those buildings in Japan. And they swayed and they rocked, but they didn't fall down. A lot of other countries in Asia, if you were in a building, it would have fallen down," Berger said. "So Japan is invested and understands that these things are important. And … they're wealthy enough that they can construct buildings in a seismic-resistant fashion."
But public awareness is also key to limiting casualties. "Part of the reason why the Japanese came through it so often is they all know what to do when an earthquake happens," Rood said.
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Brown added that Japan's response earthquakes was good, keeping casualties and damage to a minimum. He said its state-of-the-art warning systems worked very well. Until the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Brown said Japan knew there was a tsunami risk, but did not know it was going to be as bad as it was. That information had "simply not worked its way through the system from scientific observations into practice early enough," he said.
That learning process cost thousands of lives in the case of Indonesia, which was the hardest-hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Hawaii's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent an early tsunami warning to Indonesia, which was then passed it down the official channels. But the entire region, according to the center, did not have warning systems in place that might have spared some of the more than 200,000 lives lost to the disaster.
"Indonesia is a little more prepared for a repeat because they have set up an early warning system," said Rood. "Now that early warning system doesn't work all the time...but other times it has actually produced a good warning so that when the earthquake happens and a tsunami threatens, the people are getting some warning."
Arshinta, the Director of YAKKUM Emergency Unit in Yogyakarta, Indonesia said in an email interview that the trend shows a decreased casualty rate since 2004. In 2006, about 6,000 people died in a magnitude 6.3 earthquake compared to 704 deaths in a 2009 magnitude 7.6 tremor, she said. And according to an Indonesian National Disaster Management Agency report, 1,711people died in 2010 due to natural disasters, compared to 2,620 deaths in 2009.
While much has been done to empower communities, Arshinta said the capacity of Indonesian disaster agencies remains low.
But some problems "require long-term systematic changes to the way society is configured and the way it uses the landscape," said Brown. "If you don't build to reduce the casualties, you lose lives. If you do build to reduce the casualties, you lose money because all of that investment and infrastructure is lost to the disaster," he said.
The point, according to Tom Murphy, Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Land Institute, is "to understand that you need to not act like it's never going to happen again."
Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who coordinated rebuilding efforts in U.S. states ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said people in parts of New Orleans built 15 feet below sea level. "So you could stand in your front yard and watch a ship go by 15 feet above you in the Industrial Canal." He said the lesson there is that "countries and regions need to be very careful about how they permit people to develop in the areas that are at risk of disaster."
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This is also true of Bangladesh, a South Asian country typically vulnerable to storms and floods by virtue of being situated on the Ganges Delta and its tributaries.
When a cyclone struck the country in 1991, nearly 139,000 people perished, mostly by drowning. But the next same-size cyclone in 2007 claimed 4,000 lives - a significantly lower number of casualties. In contrast, Burger said Burma lost over 100,000 people to Cyclone Nargis the following year, even though both storms were of the same size.
"A lot of contributions and investments have been made by the international community and the government of Bangladesh in improving their response. And unfortunately, that hadn't been done in Burma," said Berger.
Even countries typically in the path of storms are caught unprepared. That was the case with the Philippine's Mindanao region, an area unaccustomed to typhoons, which recently encountered Typhoon Sendong.
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When the storm struck, for example, Rood said tree logs that were stacked came down with the flood and battered houses. "And because they were so unprepared, more than a 1,000 people died," he said.
Rood said there is a tendency in disasters - not just in Asia – to respond rather than prepare. But as natural disasters increase in frequency, he said many people are beginning to understand that disaster risk reduction is a long-term concern. "Even the current levels of…natural disasters leave a terrible human toll," said Rood. "And as the world gets more crowded with people, that human toll will only increase," said Rood.
"You can't put a price on the lives saved when we invest in disaster risk reduction," Berger said.
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