Food security
Responding to earthquakes 2008
Lessons from earthquake relief and recovery operations
Authors:
; ALNAP
Publisher:
Reliefweb, 2008
Resulting from a merging of two earlier papers on humanitarian responses, this paper aims to provide a distillation of the learning from thirty years of humanitarian response to earthquakes. It concentrates on issues of particular relevance in earthquakes.
The paper singles out earthquakes from Tsunami’s and other disasters. It also stresses that one of the strongest lessons emerging from recent natural disasters is that providing effective support to recovery, and not disaster relief, is the overarching challenge of responding to earthquakes. It breaks the learning down into four categories.
Recovery first:
- recovery is the overriding challenge - agencies need to focus on the recovery phase even from the start of the operation as there is no gap between relief and recovery, and recovery is the biggest challenge in sudden-onset natural disasters
- set realistic time-frames for recovery affected governments, donors and agency managers need to set realistic time-frames for funding for the recovery phase coherent with the context of the disaster.
- disease is unlikely - agencies should not overstate the risk of disease, as this leads to the misallocation of resources, and promotes needless fear in an already traumatised population
- the ratio of dead to injured varies widely - there is no simple way of predicting the ratio of dead to injured, as this ratio can vary widely.
- livelihoods are closely tied to shelter - agencies need to link their livelihood and shelter approaches
- livelihoods are the key to recovery - agencies should give the same priority to livelihoods as does the affected population
- use existing social capital - agencies can support social capital and local networks
- ask recipients if your assistance is appropriate - cultural awareness helps to prevent errors at the very start of an operation.
