|
On the Road to the Kobe World Conference:
Latin America Experts Prepare Disaster Mitigation Agenda
More than 100 experts
from 18 Latin American countries met in Nicaragua in April
to review the current state of disaster vulnerability in the
Region, record the achievements to date in risk reduction,
and prepare an action plan to reduce vulnerability in health
facilities and water systems over the next ten years. They
stressed the need for these important topics to be debated
in national political agendas, be supported by the necessary
budgetary funding and be backed by a legal framework that
will help ensure the mandate is carried forward.
As a preparatory meeting
for the U.N.’s Second World Conference on Disaster Reduction,
which will be held in Kobe, Japan next January, participants
divided into two workshops to study issues related to vulnerability
reduction in health facilities and water systems. Recommendations
were proposed that will be introduced at the Kobe conference.
Health
facilities
As a baseline, participants analyzed the recommendations of
the International Conference on Disaster Mitigation in Health
Facilities, held in 1996 in Mexico, noting that the work is
far from complete and efforts must be redoubled to guarantee
that health facilities continue functioning in the aftermath
of disasters. The technical and scientific advances in this
field and the successful examples of even those countries
with scant economic resources demonstrate that it is possible
to reduce vulnerability when the decision makers in the health
sector take the appropriate action. One point that has severely
affected these initiatives was identified as the absence of
consistent funding for maintenance, which leads to progressive
deterioration of infrastructure and equipment in all health
facilities.
How can governments protect the lives
of their citizens, the costly investment they have made in
health infrastructure and the functionality of these critical
facilities in the aftermath of disasters? For this to happen,
the participants concluded that it is essential that governments
enact a national disaster mitigation policy that governs new
health facilities and that they retrofit existing facilities
located in high-risk areas.
Drinking
water infrastructure
At this parallel workshop, participants concluded that both
the knowledge and the technology exist to enable disaster-stricken
developing countries to make drinking water available to the
affected population. However, in order to change the paradigm
that it is too costly to protect these systems, national authorities
in the water and sanitation sector must familiarize themselves
with current state-of-the-art knowledge and with hard-won
experience and lessons learned in order to protect the health
and development of the population.
One important point of agreement: not
taking risk management into account during the planning and
development of water services jeopardizes the safety of these
systems and will make it difficult to achieve one of the Millennium
Development Goals that seeks to “Halve by 2015 the proportion
of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
and basic sanitation.”
For more information on health facilities
workshop contact mitigacion@ecu.ops-oms.org;
on the drinking water infrastructure workshop, contact: desastre@cepis.ops-oms.org.
Complete information on the web at www.paho.org/desastres.
Next
Index
|
