Disaster management and planning: an IBLF framework for business response

This briefing is aimed at providing the business sector with a basic framework that can assist them in developing their own response to natural and manmade disasters where a need and interest has been highlighted by the recent Asian tsunami disaster.

The paper identifies three spheres of influence, through which the business sector can contribute to mitigating the consequences of disasters:

• their core business activities – the workplace, the marketplace and along the supply chain
• their social and philanthropic activities within the communities they operate
• their engagement in public policy dialogue and advocacy activities.

Using all three spheres of influence business and industry leaders and their business partners should develop and adopt a three-point strategy for action – rescue, relief and recovery – and tuned to local circumstances.

Rescue:

• rescue of people stranded, trapped and injured, and location of bodies
• making places safe
• meeting basic immediate needs for safe drinking water, food, medical attention, shelter, contact with families and notification.

Relief :

• damage assessment and coordinating effort to meet basic human needs
• coordination efforts to meet immediate tasks of humanitarian relief, combining locally and with official and international relief efforts for water purification, food hygiene and feeding, care and shelter
• providing communication, logistics and infrastructure repair help
• getting through to remote locations
• collecting vital intelligence on people, damage, health risks and what is happening.

Recovery:

• rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure and a return to some level of normality and economic recovery
• the challenge of sustaining livelihoods of small business people and industry workers must be addressed as the crucial link to long-term self-help and mutual aid
• the recovery phase will determine the prospects for millions of people. Long-term livelihoods become the overriding concern
• this phase is substantially different from the first two stages as it deals with redevelopment of social infrastructure and economic activities after the emergency tasks of rescue and relief have been done.