This year’s South Asian monsoon has once again uprooted people from their homes in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – around 12 million are affected. The European Commission’s humanitarian aid teams have been assessing the needs in the flooded areas. Humanitarian assistance from the European Union – over €24 million – is already reaching the afflicted and the vulnerable in the worst flood-hit regions.

Destructive floods swept through that part of Asia last year as well, hurting especially badly the people that are already suffering from poverty and precarious livelihood. With recurrent and increasingly intense disasters striking vulnerable communities every year, it is clear that people’s flood-coping capacity is depleted – each disaster drives an impoverished village into deeper vulnerability and further from the opportunity for development.

Kabir Sahoo, a 65-year-old resident of Mangarajpur village in Orissa, India, says this is the worst flood he has seen since 1982. “The flood has caused damage not only to our homes but to standing crops as well; it is beyond my imagination,” he told the humanitarian experts from the European Commission who recently visited his village.

There are millions of stories like Kabir’s – and we are helping millions of people like him. But the growth in disasters’ intensity and frequency pushes up the needs. Meanwhile, it is certain that not all hazards need to turn into disasters. This is why the European Commission has made the building of resilience of high-risk communities an integral part of its humanitarian aid policy. Simple measures for disaster preparedness – early warning alerts, elevated homes and the provision of boats – can make all the difference between saving or losing lives, homes and livestock.

“In Mangarajapur village, the Commission had funded a flood response project in 2007 which incorporated disaster preparedness, including the set-up of Disaster Management Teams composed of local people,” said Tapan Mahapatra, our Programme Officer who recently returned from the flood areas. “It was remarkable to see how quickly these teams managed to disseminate flood alerts, evacuate families, rescue marooned people, transfer patients to hospitals and organise the distribution of food and relief items. In the villages where the teams operated, more people were saved,” he explained.

Tapan and his colleagues saw similar examples in other villages in Orissa: for instance, how helpful were the boats that the Commission funded in 2004 and 2007 – at the most recent flooding, they were used for search and rescue operations. Another example can be found in Uttar Pradesh, where aboveground and flood-resistant water systems that were built in 2007 have ensured immediate access to clean drinking water for flood survivors.

Today, on the international Disaster Risk Reduction Day, we have a good occasion to talk about examples like these – they prove that mitigation and preparedness help reduce the impact of disasters. But we also need to factor disaster risk reduction in our policies not just today, but every day – because it is not a cost, but an investment.

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Tags: disaster risk reduction, floods, India, Pakistan, preparedness, prevention