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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Coping with disasters

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A week after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Abra and other areas in Luzon, it’s only now that we are getting a clearer picture of the devastation it caused.

As of end-July, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council reported that the temblor left 10 dead, 320 injured and 228,238 individuals or 62,024 families displaced in the Ilocos Region, Cagayan Valley and the Cordillera Administrative Region.

The NDRRMC also estimated the cost of damage to infrastructure and property at P1.2 billion – and counting.

The strong earthquake has once again renewed calls for the establishment of a separate department to address the problem of disasters and reduce their adverse effects on lives and property.

As we know, it is the NDRRMC that now overseas the government’s disaster response efforts. It is a multi-sectoral, multi-organizational structure consisting of more than 40 people from almost all departments, including, would you believe, the Foreign Affairs Secretary!

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As a council, the NDRRMC decides only on policies, and leaves the actual work to the Office of Civil Defense under the Department of National Defense.

This underscores once again the urgent need for Congress to fast-track the passage of a bill creating the Department of Disaster Resilience, which will be the primary agency responsible for disaster preparedness, prevention, mitigation, response, recovery and rehabilitation.

Once the DDR is up and running, it can facilitate the creation of permanent evacuation centers and the formulation of disaster management plans at the local levels to meet the ideal goal of zero-casualty in times of disaster.

The creation of the DDR would ensure a more efficient, coordinated, and complete system of disaster management – from risk assessment to emergency response right down to reintegration assistance and rehabilitation.

The proposed department would take on the powers and functions of the Office of Civil Defense, the Climate Change Office of the Climate Change Commission, the Geo-Hazard Assessment and Engineering Geology Section of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, and other agencies now performing disaster response and management functions. That is how it should be.

There are in fact at least 12 bills proposing the creation of the DDR, but not one of these has been passed by Congress.

But wait. Not everyone agrees that a separate department is needed to respond to disasters.

Some are saying what is needed is to strengthen the NDRRMC and not create another layer in the already bloated bureaucracy, especially at this time when the economy has yet to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. They have a point there.

In any event, we know that the Philippines is among the most disaster-prone countries in the world.

We lie in the path of destructive typhoons from the Pacific Ocean that cause flooding and landslides that lead to loss of lives and property.

We are also part of the so-called ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’ consisting of active volcanoes that can cause massive destruction once they erupt.

We likewise know that here in our country there are geographic faults that trigger earthquakes and cause death and destruction in our communities.

And we have our fair share every year of man-made disasters, such as fires that exact a heavy toll on lives and property and even on the economy as a whole, and armed conflict in some parts of the country that lead to displacement of people from their homes.

The sad reality is that developing countries such as the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the adverse impact of natural disasters.

In other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the annual economic loss due to natural disasters is around 0.6 percent to 0.7 percent of the country’s GDP.

Natural disasters exact a heavy toll on the Philippine economy annually, amounting to as much as P130 billion in damages, according to the Department of Finance, equivalent to about 1.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, by DOF estimates.

The higher we try to climb up the economic ladder, we find ourselves falling every time a disaster strikes.

This should not be our ineluctable fate at all, if only we are fully prepared to cope with natural disasters, whether it is a full-fledged department or another agency with clear responsibilities to protect lives and property from both natural and man-made catastrophes.

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