Disaster Warning and Response Systems in Small island States
- Barbados meeting, 8-9, August 2005 - Report

Suzanne Shende, member of the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras which is a member organization of GROOTS and Huairou Commission, was invited to participate in an "Experts Meeting" on Disaster Warning and Response Systems in Small Island Developing States Regions in Barbados, 8-9 August, 2005. As a result of her participation in January's UNISDR World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, she was called upon to integrate the perspective of communities and grassroots women into this meeting of primarily technical and engineering experts and intergovernmental organizations representatives.

The goal of the meeting was to produce a report and recommendations for the Secretaries General of the Commonwealth, in the wake of last year's tsunami. The other participants, representing 3 regions of Small Island Developing States - Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific, included people from the Caribbean
Disaster Emergency Resource Agency, South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission, Comision Ocean Indien (COI), CARICOM, UN ISDR, International Tsunami Information Center, Commonwealth Secretariat, European Commission, World Bank, Puerto Rican Seismic Network, Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), USAID (as observer), Central Emergency Relief Organization, and a South African woman consultant, who was the person who had met Suzanne and Suranjana Gupta in the women´s caucus meetings held by Groots/Huairou at Kobe.

With the participation of Shende and the openness of the consultant Hay, it was possible to introduce into the dialogue priorities that might have been otherwise overlooked -- women leadership, community participation, resilience, integration of traditional and local knowledge, and livelihood issues -- and to a certain extent, suggest their inclusion in the final documents and recommendations.

There was a need to balance a very technological outlook with a more integrated, people-centered and gendered approach. For instance, while the technology of early warning systems is important and receiving a lot of attention after the Dec 04 tsunami, there also needs to be a focus on communities in early warning --
not simply as recipients of information but also as designers of systems, actors, planners, monitors and evaluators.

Some common themes that emerged were:
- need for a multi-hazard approach (don't strengthen just tsunami-preparedness)
- need for greater geo-political integration
- need to strengthen systems from, at, and to the community level
- need to design and apply standards for building,planning approval (i.e. setbacks), infrastructure
- need for training 'attachments' across regions
- integrating existing networks and developing protocols for sharing information .
- mainstreaming disaster management into development planning

Shende attempted to explain how, in each element above, community participation and women leadership had to be incorporated. For example, if speaking about training, it must be more than 'professional development', professionals being sent across regions to learn technical skills, development of university curriculum, it must also involve multiple forms of training relevant to communities and grassroots women --- training communities to carry out mitigation techniques and monitoring, to do hazard mapping; having communities train one another; having communities train 'disaster professionals'. In developing and applying standards, defining standards for effective community participation in disaster management could make this a really pioneering approach.

A need was also identified for "economic appraisal" evidence - indicators, cost-benefit analyses, ways to measure what are usually externailites. As we have heard in many contexts, this is needed in order to convince funders it is worthwhile, whether you are trying to get them to invest in EWS or community centered models of DM and preparedness. The examples Shende knew of through Groots and Huairou Commission and was able to present helped in the discussion, whether it be in cost efficiency of community involvement in disaster preparedness, or need for gender awareness and cultural sensitivity in dissemination of EWS information. The study by Maureen Fordham, information from the Honolulu Gender and Disaster Risk Red Reduction and examples from IFRCRC were also helpful.

Participants that it is necessary to tie these issues to the Millenimum Development Goals, and that the September MDG review is an advantageous time to be raising these issues, and want to track the commitment of 5% of human and development aid funding going towards disaster risk reduction.

The final summary and recommendations of the meeting have not yet been released, but can be made available through these listserves if there is interest. In the second of the 5 draft recommendations is the point most relevant to grassroots women empowerment in the process: "Create awareness and actions at the highest political levels to ensure grass roots participation, with particular emphasis on the role of women, is integral to all disaster risk reduction and disaster management activities."

For more information, there are background documents available on the commonwealth website www.thecommonwealth.org under Our Work, select: Small States go to News and Events.

http://www.thecommonwealth.org/shared_asp_files/uploadedfiles/A480833D-7EFD-42BE-B3C5-1D2E75ECA287_FinalWrap-upReportPt1.pdf