Brookings: Topics - Haiti

A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Japan Foreign Aid Policies for Disaster Reduction

Goshi Tsukamoto — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The international community faces a variety of challenges caused by population growth, environmental problems, and an increase in the frequency of natural disasters in the last half century. In many parts of the world, calamities such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, storm surges, and tsunamis have caused a number of tragedies by creating socio-economic disorder, sometimes leading to unprecedented physical and human disruption.

Relatively well-governed countries have sufficient capabilities for rapid reaction and long-term recovery efforts, and are able to build resilience against adverse situations in their societies. Unfortunately, however, in a number of developing countries adequate social institutions and infrastructure have not been established to deal with such situations due to political, economic or historical factors. These regions remain relatively vulnerable to natural catastrophes, and their people are outside the circle of prosperity. [1]

In the global context, as described in 2011 in the initial Policy Framework document from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), providing assistance in disaster-stricken areas is a fundamental expression of common humanity, representing a visible manifestation of a common belief that is both morally right and strategically sound. [2] While nation states must take the primary responsibility for dealing with their own catastrophes, it is essential for the international community to help others help themselves, based on partnerships.[3] Large-scale disasters in developing countries inevitably cause enormous damage with wide-ranging and long-lasting effects, often eventually resulting in the deterioration of society as a whole. In relation to disaster reduction efforts in developing countries, the significance of international technical and financial cooperation is now shared as a global consensus. In fact, emergency relief and disaster reduction, particularly in developing countries, have become a main focus of international cooperation.[4] Donors have committed themselves to lending life-saving humanitarian assistance through rapid response to emergencies in poorer countries and sharing lessons and technologies to support adequate preparation for disasters. These new techniques and practices are expected to be institutionalized in recipient societies over the long term.

[1] They are more likely to suffer from extremely serious damage from natural disasters and may even be displaced nationally and internationally in some cases. It should also be noted that people in these nations additionally tend to suffer from secondary effects such as a deterioration in sanitary conditions and food shortages, which may last a long time.

[2] United States Agency for International Development, USAID Policy Framework, 2011-2015, p. 2; accessed February 26, 2013, http://transition.usaid.gov/policy/USAID_PolicyFramework.PDF.

[3] Looking at past catastrophic natural disasters, the international community has recognized the importance of disaster reduction and promoted international cooperation in and with vulnerable countries.

[4] In fact, numerous countermeasures against natural phenomena have been designed and implemented.

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Authors

Goshi Tsukamoto

Image Source: © Kena Betancur / Reuters

Haiti Three Years On: Overpromised and Underdelivered

Elizabeth Ferris — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:40:00 -0500

Much has been written about Haiti since the massive earthquake devastated the country three years ago this week. Hundreds of evaluations and thousands of reports have been written by the humanitarian community and many more by other actors. I took a quick look at our own website and was surprised to find that in the last three years I have written 18 blogs, articles and op-eds on Haiti and our small project has organized 6 events to debate issues related to Haitian relief and recovery.

And now there’s a fresh outpouring of editorials and reports about what went wrong in Haiti – more specifically what went wrong with the humanitarian response. I’m presently 90 pages into a brand-new book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. While it is a gripping read, I can already tell that the story will have a bitter ending.

Everyone is critical about the mistakes that were made, the lack of results and the agonizingly slow pace of recovery. In part, this is because the needs in Haiti were so desperate and displayed in vibrant color in our living rooms, but also perhaps due to residual Western guilt about past failures in Haiti. But the criticisms are also related to the unprecedented outpouring of generosity. Governments pledged almost $10 billion (although almost half has not been disbursed and a lot of the money went to support projects that were already in the pipeline). Ordinary citizens around the world dug deep into their own pockets to support Haitian relief efforts. One out of every two Americans personally contributed money for relief. The fact that the recovery hasn’t gone well seems like a betrayal to individual donors who gave generously in the expectation that their aid would make a difference.

I went back and looked at the opinion piece I wrote a few days after the 2010 earthquake, “three keys to relief in Haiti.” I was a bit surprised to find that I still agreed with what I wrote then, in particular in my call that the relief effort:

1. Strengthen Haiti’s government
2. Support Haiti’s community groups
3. Let the United Nations take the lead in coordinating international relief

Much of the critical commentary today focuses on the lack of involvement of the Haitian government and the exclusion of Haiti’s community groups from the process. The Haitian government simply did not have the capacity, nor perhaps the will, to make the decisions needed to enable effective relief and recovery. From securing sites to dumping rubble to dealing with land tenure to providing a development framework into which international assistance should fit – the Haitian government couldn’t make the decisions which were desperately needed. While some Haitian community groups were strengthened, too often international agencies chose to set up their own programs rather than work through existing community structures. Once again, the dominant perception seems to be that internationals ran roughshod over Haiti. While the UN tried valiantly to set up effective coordination mechanisms, I haven’t heard anyone, including my UN colleagues, argue that the relief effort in Haiti was well-coordinated. The fact is that the media attention and the outpouring of support made the disaster too high-profile for donors and private groups to submit to the discipline that meaningful coordination requires.

If I were writing this today, I would add a fourth "key to relief":

4. Don’t promise too much.

Expectations about Haitian relief and recovery were high. “Build back better,” was the motto. Not only were people going to be rescued from the rubble and receive medical treatment, food, water and clothing – but Haiti would be transformed by the recovery effort. Past inequities would be addressed. The country’s failed infrastructure would be replaced. Haiti would be "built back better."

We promised too much. Lofty aspirations create expectations and when those expectations are not met, the disappointments are all the greater. The fact is that there was no way that humanitarian actors could deliver on all those promises. Humanitarian agencies are very good at delivering relief quickly and effectively. They are getting better and better. But the problems in Haiti after the earthquake were not primarily the result of the earthquake, but rather the result of centuries of political turmoil, lack of development, entrenched interests.

A fundamental dilemma in disaster response is the tension between the natural impulse to respond quickly and doing things right. For example, in the case of Haiti (and most other disasters), people want housing built as fast as possible. After all, people are exposed to the elements and when the money is available and the need is so urgent, why not just build new homes and worry about the details later? But the details matter. Building new houses on land where ownership is unclear is a recipe for disaster down the road. In Haiti doing things right meant not only fixing the land tenure system, but also developing building codes, revitalizing the judiciary, changing public perceptions of the role of government – these are not areas where humanitarian agencies have expertise. These are not things that can be done quickly. Fundamentally, they are not things that the international community can do although they can support governments to do them. Even in the United States with all of its resources, recovery after Katrina took far longer than three years and many would argue is not yet complete.

When the next disaster occurs, let’s lower expectations of what we expect from humanitarian response. Let’s take seriously the need to engage development actors from the beginning of emergency response. Let’s deliver more than we promise. Let’s expect our humanitarian responders to provide immediate life-saving relief to desperate people and let’s expect our agencies specialized in long-term development to step up much earlier. Let’s re-orient our aid programs to strengthening the government of the affected country – even if that slows things down. Let’s channel more of our funds through community groups so that they become more effective in their own communities – even if that means changing our priorities. Let’s demand that the agencies delivering relief – whether USAID or Oxfam or a Haitian-American congregation in Queens – participate in coordination mechanisms. And let’s keep plugging away to make our coordination mechanisms more inclusive and more effective. We can do better than we did in Haiti, but let’s not promise things we can’t deliver.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Image Source: © Swoan Parker / Reuters

Lessons from Haiti: Innovations in Tracking and Housing Internally Displaced Persons

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Event Information

December 13, 2012
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

As disasters continue to displace large and diverse populations around the globe, tracking the movements and assessing the needs of internally displaced persons (IDPs) is crucial to protecting and assisting them. This was particularly evident after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti where thousands were displaced and the capital city was virtually flattened. Tracking and housing the 1.5 million people displaced by the earthquake and its aftershocks required new tools from the humanitarian community. One key development from this was the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), a monitoring tool designed to track the movements of IDPs and provide up-to-date information on basic demographics and conditions in IDP camps throughout the cycle of displacement.

On December 13, the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement and the International Organization for Migration hosted a discussion of some of the innovations used in responding to Haiti’s IDPs, with a particular focus on the DTM as a humanitarian community tool and on innovative housing solutions developed to respond to a complex situation. Panelists included: Vincent Cochetel, representative from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Lorenza Rossi, data analyst for the International Organization for Migration in Haiti; Charles Setchell, senior shelter, settlements and hazard mitigation advisor, Office of US Foreign Disasters Assistance; and Vlatko Avramovski, data management and registration program coordinator for the International Organization for Migration Haiti mission. Senior Fellow Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Project on Internal Displacement, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Event Handouts:

Event Presentations

Vlatko Avramovski and Lorenza Rossi
Presentation Slides

Charles Setchell
Presentation Slides

Notes from the Field: Haiti-Displacement and Development in the "Republic of NGOs"

Megan Bradley — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:30:00 -0400

Haiti is often nicknamed the "republic of NGOs." Since the earthquake of 12 January 2010, the number of NGOs – mostly relief and development groups – working in Haiti exploded from 3,000 to an estimated 10,000. Touching down in Port-au-Prince on Friday, it struck me that Haiti, or at least its capital, could also be known as the republic of rebar. Across the cityscape, rebar protrudes from thousands of roofless buildings, attesting to the progress made since the earthquake that virtually flattened the city and killed 223,000, but also the work that remains to be done.

Last month, former President Bill Clinton’s Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti, announced that almost half of the $12.32 billion pledged by governments for relief and recovery in Haiti from 2010 to 2020 has now been disbursed. The amount of aid delivered in Haiti in 2010 alone outstripped the country's total internal revenue by four times. This considerable expenditure has not yielded a coherent response to one of the country's greatest post-disaster challenges: Haiti's housing crisis. 1.5 million people were displaced by the earthquake and its aftershocks. Now, more than two and a half years later, 369,000 remain displaced. They are sheltered in tent cities in Port-au-Prince and on crowded sidewalks in shanties made with tarps emblazoned with the logos of the republic's many NGOs, and the words "From the American people."

Scattergun efforts have been made to resolve the persistent displacement problem, including the eviction of thousands encamped in public squares. Some have benefitted from efforts to repair 15,000 of the 200,000 homes damaged or destroyed by the quake. Others have accessed grants to enable them to move into rental apartments for one year. What will happen after the year is up remains to be seen.

One of the most controversial strategies embraced by the Haitian government and its international supporters has been to push against the tide that has over past decades brought untold scores of Haitians from the impoverished countryside to the capital, leaving Port-au-Prince impossibly, almost unbelievably, crowded. Many programs have incentivized relocation to rural communities, offering housing and other forms of critically needed support to those willing to leave the city.

Conversations I've had with Haitians this week in villages between Port-au-Prince and Léogâne, the epicenter of the quake, highlight the promise and peril of this strategy. Many Haitians are remarkably eager to return to – or stay in – their towns and villages. The issue now, as it was before the quake, is the lack of work and development opportunities across the country, but particularly outside the cities. Even in this "republic of NGOs," the reach of NGO-supported development initiatives remains modest – almost as modest as the reach of the Haitian state into its rural communities. It is increased support for sustainable livelihoods – through NGOs but above all through a strengthened Haitian state – that is essential to durable solutions for those who remain in the tent cities and sidewalk shanties. That only ten percent of earthquake recovery funds to date have been channeled through the government of Haiti should caution against optimism that the government will be able to shoulder this responsibility any time soon.

One of the brightest and most energetic young men I met in the Haitian countryside this week admitted that while he dreams of working as an engineer, upon graduation he will likely have to follow the national trend and "go home and sit down." Haitians like the young man I met want to work to create viable futures for themselves and their families outside the compacted chaos of Port-au-Prince. Resolving the country's lingering displacement crisis requires this challenge be met head on.

Authors

Megan Bradley

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Housing and Disasters: Thoughts on Hurricane Katrina and Haiti

Elizabeth Ferris — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Recently I spent a day at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), reviewing the results of a draft study on a housing program for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Although I’ve worked on many disasters elsewhere, it was fascinating to look at longer-term displacement from a U.S. disaster.

No one knows for sure how many people were displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but most estimates are in the 1-1.5 million range. While memories of Katrina – and the slow response to the disaster – will probably remain in the American consciousness for a long time, I think most people somehow assume that after a couple of years, everyone’s taken care of. And there’s also an assumption that the answer for people without homes is rebuilding and repairing homes that were destroyed or damaged in the disaster.

But FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), HUD and the many civil society organizations were well aware that after two and a half years, there were still people in acute need of housing. In response, HUD developed a program known as the Disaster Housing Assistance Program (or DHAP-Katrina for short) to provide transitional housing, through rental subsidies, to people who had nowhere to live. The program provided rental subsidies to some 33,000 people – mainly women, African-American and renters – who were not receiving assistance from HUD. The program was generally successful in helping people get back on their feet and seemed to fill a gap between temporary shelter (such as the FEMA trailers) and longer-term housing security. It wasn’t so clear, however, at least not in the expert panel meeting I attended, what long-term solutions people found after the program ended.

It was particularly interesting because two days later I found myself in the (more familiar) setting of a meeting at UN headquarters listening to a senior Haitian official, Mr. Clément Bélizaire, Director of Relocation and Rehabilitation of Precarious Neighborhoods, talk about housing issues after the devastating earthquake which left 1.5 million people homeless. ‘It has been two and a half years since the Haitian earthquake,’ he said, ‘and there are still 420,000 displaced Haitians living in 600 camps’.

Now, the U.S. and Haiti have very little in common when it comes to governmental capacity, infrastructure, economic resources, and most other factors but I found it fascinating that in both cases, the two governments recognized, after two and a half years, that there were still people in need of housing assistance and that reconstruction and repair weren’t the answer. In both cases, those in need of longer-term assistance tended to be renters rather than homeowners. In both cases, the price of rental housing had skyrocketed after the disaster and people who had managed to afford rents before the disasters were unable to do so afterwards. And in both cases, governmental agencies turned to subsidizing rents for displaced persons to address these needs. Mr. Bélizaire reported that 97 percent of Haiti’s displaced persons preferred rental subsidies over other solutions – mainly because they didn’t own homes. Rebuilding individual family homes didn’t meet the needs of those who were renters before the disasters. There are, of course, important differences between the Haitian and Katrina examples.

But the ultimate lessons I took away from the two very different meetings are that: finding housing solutions for those displaced by disasters (either in very rich or in very poor countries) takes a long time. Long after the television cameras have moved on, when people don’t have a secure place to live, the disaster continues. Furthermore, those who seem to be most in need of housing are among the most vulnerable in the communities and are disproportionately renters rather than homeowners.

Rental subsidies make a lot of sense in these contexts, and yet may not be long-term solutions. What happens when the subsidies end? In the case of those displaced by Katrina, a follow-on program was initiated and existing government programs for low-income housing provided a safety net for many of those affected. In the case of Haiti, it’s not at all clear what will happen when the rental subsidies run out. In both cases, I was struck by the close relationship between access to housing and employment or livelihoods. When people have jobs, full-time jobs at a decent wage, they are generally able to find housing solutions. But if they don’t, then rental subsidies are just another temporary solution.

Finally, access to housing is always a political issue. With some notable exceptions, renters almost always have less political clout than homeowners which may explain why rebuilding programs to support homeowners tends to get priority in disaster reconstruction. But since funding, attention and yes even compassion tends to be highest in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, I suggest that authorities undertake their contingency planning and begin their long-term recovery efforts with poor or low-income renters in mind.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Image Source: © Swoan Parker / Reuters

Protecting People in Cities: The Disturbing Case of Haiti

Elizabeth Ferris and Sara Ferro-Ribeiro — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Note: Edited version to be published by Disasters (Overseas Development Institute and Blackwell Publishing)

Introduction

Disaster struck Haiti on 12 January 2010 in the form of a 7.0 earthquake which left some 223,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 2 million homeless. This 60-second earthquake, occurring in Léogâne, near the capital city, Port-au-Prince, had a particularly devastating impact on the Haitian government, with nearly 30 percent of its civil servants killed, all but one government ministry building destroyed, and basic infrastructure wiped out. The United Nations (UN) experienced its greatest loss of life on a single day ever, when 102 staff members died (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP) 2011). By any standards, it was a mega-disaster.

The international community mobilized rapidly and massively to assist Haiti. UN and other international agencies deployed staff quickly, thousands of NGOs rushed to the scene, donor governments and military forces sent personnel and some $3 billion was pledged in relief and recovery efforts. Indeed almost two-thirds of all international funds mobilized for natural disaster response in 2010 went to Haiti (Ferris & Petz 2011). Clusters, the international mechanism for coordinating humanitarian response, were set up, international staff arrived by the hundreds in Port-au-Prince, programs were established and aid poured in.

It was a monumental effort and there have been many efforts to evaluate the international humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake. Indeed, as of February 2011 ALNAP counted 45 evaluations of response to the earthquake (ALNAP 2011). In summarizing the results of these evaluations, ALNAP identified several commonly-identified shortcomings:

a ceaseless flow of often-inexperienced small NGOs and in-kind donations;
a limited understanding of the context, particularly the urban setting;
by-passing of local authorities and civil society groups;
insufficient communication with affected populations;
lack of attention to how assistance could better support coping strategies; and
weak humanitarian leadership structures, including a weak relationship with military.

While the evaluations will undoubtedly continue and lessons will hopefully be learned to guide future humanitarian response, this study looks at one particular issue—protection—with a specific focus on the impact of Haiti’s unprecedented urban emergency on existing tools and definitions of protection. This study is based on field research carried out in Haiti, particularly the involvement of one of the authors as staff of the International Organization for Migration with particular responsibility for Camp Management and Coordination.

It is important to underline that the failure of protection in Haiti was largely due to the inability of the Haitian government to redress a chaotic and difficult reality. It is unlikely that international actors, even if the system had worked perfectly, would have been able to fully protect Haitians in this environment. The international actors managed to provide basic services and relief items and were at least moderately successful in staving off the worst effects of a cholera epidemic and hurricanes, but they were unable to provide physical safety to Haitians—arguably the most basic of human rights.

This paper argues that there were two principal reasons for this failure:

The definition of protection as used in Haiti was simply too broad. International actors spent far too much time trying to define what protection was and the definition that emerged—full respect for all human rights—was not helpful in setting priorities in an urban setting characterized by immense need. Consequently, the clusters working on protection issues defined their tasks and priorities differently and ultimately were not effective in protecting the majority of Haitians.
The standard international protection tools which have developed over the past five to ten years simply did not work in Haiti.

While there were many Haitians in need of protection following the earthquake, this study only examines protection in camps and settlements. Protection of other groups, such as orphans and detainees, was reportedly carried out more successfully than for those living in settlements and camps, but that issue lies beyond the scope of this study.

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Authors

Elizabeth Ferris
Sara Ferro-Ribeiro

Publication: Disasters Journal

Chapter 2 - 2011: Natural Disasters Reviewed

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

This chapter begins by exploring some of the overall disaster statistics in 2011 in comparison with recent years. It takes a brief look at some of the disasters that occurred in 2011 outside the developed world and will examine the ongoing relief and reconstruction efforts following the two 2010 mega-disasters, the floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. The third section of this chapter looks at the imperfect science of measuring economic damage caused by disasters, followed by a fourth section, which will analyze trends in international disaster response, looking at developments related to international disaster response law and some of the debates and developments surrounding the humanitarian cluster system. Last but not least, we will review international humanitarian disaster funding for 2011 to see how well (or how poorly) disaster responses were funded in the past year.

Publication: The Year that Shook the Rich: A Review of Natural Disasters in 2011

Urban Disasters, Conflict and Violence: Implications for Humanitarian Work

Elizabeth Ferris — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

These remarks were originally given by Elizabeth Ferris on February 28, 2012 at a workshop for staff of World Vision on natural disasters in urban areas.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in today’s discussions with World Vision staff on Post-Disaster Urban Recovery. I want to begin by noting a few general trends and then focus my remarks on the intersection between violence and disasters and the implications of this for urban disaster recovery.

We live in an urban world. Over half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas – a percentage that is expected to increase in the coming years. As more people live in cities, more urban residents will be affected by natural hazards. Moreover, the frequency and severity of natural disasters is increasing.
Not only will more people live in cities, but they will live in areas more prone to natural hazards. Globally two-thirds of the world’s cities with populations over five million are at least partially located in coastal zones[1] – areas susceptible to coastal flooding and to the effects of climate change-induced sea level rise. Poorer people moving into cities are also likely to live in poor neighborhoods located on marginal land in urban areas. Currently, more than 1 billion persons, or about 14 percent of the world’s population live in slums – a figure which is also likely to increase.[2]
Although a lot of attention is focused on the world’s megacities, in fact only 4 percent of the world’s population currently lives in megacities and most of the world’s urban growth is expected in cities with populations now under 5 million.

These trends have consequences for humanitarian actors who have developed more expertise at responding to emergencies in rural areas. In some respects working in cities is easier than working in rural areas. Communications and transportation are generally more developed in urban than in rural areas. The physical concentration of populations is greater so the logistics of delivery of assistance are often easier. Services and human resources are usually available. For example, while a hospital may suffer damage in a disaster, most cities have hospitals and trained medical staff. Because of the concentration of both media and political power in cities, there is also more attention and generally more political will to address communities affected by natural hazards in urban than in rural areas.

But at the same time, as experience in Haiti has taught us, an urban environment is often more complex than a rural one and brings its own set of challenges. In particular it is more difficult to identify beneficiaries within a large urban needy population. Directing efforts toward displaced persons, for example, may lead people to move to displacement sites in order to receive assistance. Questions around shelter/housing are as much about legal tenure and preventing evictions as about architectural design and construction. Responsibly working in longer-term recovery and reconstruction means working within an overall urban planning framework which itself may be weak or subject to intense political pressures. Finally, issues around the always-difficult boundary between humanitarian and development action are more complicated in urban areas – an issue I’ll return to later.

What does this mean for humanitarian actors, such as World Vision, responding to natural disasters in urban settings?

A need to develop new expertise, policies, and relationships. In order to respond effectively to humanitarian needs for shelter, legal expertise is needed to advise on how to deal with sticky issues of land tenure, the rights of renters and squatters to housing, and evictions. In order to develop responsible recovery/reconstruction plans, expertise in urban planning is needed. Providing technical advice to governments on basic issues of urban planning such as waste disposal systems or disaster risk reduction may be as beneficial (or more beneficial) to recovery efforts than construction of 100 or 1000 homes.

In addition to technical expertise, I think it would be helpful for humanitarian organizations to think through some of the difficult issues and decide in advance how their organizations will respond to questions such as: what will our role be in providing essential services that the state should provide but is unable to do so as the result of a natural hazard? Trucking in water may be accepted humanitarian work, but what about rebuilding a neighborhood’s sewer system? What will be the organization’s policy on working with the urban poor who may not have been directly affected by the natural disaster? For example, will health services be available to all in need? What will the organization’s role be in providing individual legal assistance on housing, land and property issues? In working for reform of land tenure systems that complicate recovery areas? These are difficult issues and it would be helpful for organizations to think through them before a natural disaster occurs. As advocates of international disaster relief law[3] (IDRL) emphasize, the chaos of the immediate aftermath of a disaster is not the best time to be thinking about far-reaching policies. Of course, different contexts require different and flexible responses, but it is likely that many of these issues will surface in more than one disaster.

Humanitarian organizations have traditionally worked in partnership with a range of other actors and have sought to strengthen humanitarian coordination in different ways. While these partnerships and coordination mechanisms are far from perfect, working in urban areas may mean a need for new and different kinds of partnerships. At least in some rural areas, it is possible to work with traditional leaders to identify vulnerable groups or to consult on programs. In urban areas, this may not be possible in part because of the mobility of urban populations. A religious leader in a slum, for example, may not have a handle on who are the most vulnerable members of a community. Humanitarian organizations will likely need to work with different levels of governmental authority, but also with a broader range of civil society organizations. Maybe a humanitarian organization doesn’t need to hire a team of lawyers to help in land tenure questions but can partner with a lawyers’ association or university law school to provide assistance.

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[1] The Government Office for Science (London), Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change, Final Project Report, 2011.

[2] UN Habitat, State of the World’s Cities 2006/07, 2006, p. 5. Note that UN Habitat defines a slum household “as a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following conditions: durable housing, sufficient living area, access to improved water and to sanitation, and secure tenure.” p. 21.

[3] See for example: IFRC, Guidelines for the Domestic Facilitation and Regulation of International Disaster Relief and Initial Recovery Assistance, 2007 (30IC/07/R4 annex), available at: www.ifrc.org.

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Elizabeth Ferris

Publication: World Vision

Rebuilding a City: The Dos and Don’ts in Post-Disaster Urban Recovery

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 6, 2011
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Population growth, urbanization and climate change expose increasing numbers of people to natural hazards in urban areas. From New Orleans in 2005 to Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010, recent urban disasters in developing and developed countries have drawn attention to challenges in post-disaster reconstruction of urban areas.

On October 6, the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement and Habitat for Humanity International hosted a discussion on the challenges of urban disaster recovery, focusing on shelter and housing, urban planning, long-term reconstruction, and disaster risk reduction as components in disaster- and climate-proofing our cities. Panelists included Jonathan Reckford, chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity International; Brookings Senior Fellow Amy Liu, co-director of the Metropolitan Policy Program; Abhas Jha, lead urban specialist and regional coordinator for disaster risk management at the World Bank; Maggie Stephenson, senior technical advisor for Haiti at UN-HABITAT; and Charles Setchell, senior shelter, settlements, and hazard mitigation advisor at USAID. Senior Fellow Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Video

Audio

Rebuilding a City: The Dos and Don’ts in Post-Disaster Urban Recovery

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20111006_urban_disasters

Participants

Panelists

Abhas K. Jha

Lead Urban Specialist and Practice Leader for Disaster Risk Management, East Asia and Pacific Region
The World Bank

Jonathan Reckford

Chief Executive Officer
Habitat for Humanity International

Charles Setchell

Senior Shelter, Settlements and Hazard Mitigation Advisor
Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, USAID

Maggie Stephenson

Senior Technical Advisor for Haiti, UN-HABITAT

A Year of Living Dangerously: A Review of Natural Disasters in 2010

Elizabeth Ferris and Daniel Petz — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Almost 300 million people were affected by natural disasters in 2010. The large disasters provided constant headlines throughout the year, beginning with the devastating earthquake in Haiti followed one month later by the even more severe—but far less deadly—earthquake in Chile. In the spring, ash spewing from volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland paralyzed flights for weeks in the northern hemisphere. Early summer witnessed the worst Russian wildfires in history while a few months later, the steadily rising floodwaters in Pakistan covered 20 percent of the country. In sum, it was a terrible year in terms of natural disasters causing havoc and destruction around the globe. However, many of the largest disasters barely made headlines in the Western press.

Most notably, over 130 million Chinese were affected by the worst flooding in recent history—this is more than five times the number of people affected by the earthquake in Haiti and the Pakistani floods combined—but the Chinese floods received far less international attention than either Pakistan or Haiti. The example of the Chinese floods illustrates one of the dilemmas in response to natural disasters, which is that disasters, even major ones, receive significantly diverging media coverage. In the case of China, although over 130 million people were affected and some 4,000 were reported killed or missing,1 very little international assistance was provided or requested. There was no overall United Nation funding appeal for those affected. The widely-regarded web-portal Reliefweb posted only 243 entries on the Chinese floods, primarily from the Chinese News Agency, in comparison with 10 times that number of entries on the flooding in Pakistan which occurred several months later in the year and affected around 20 million people.

Apart from the few large—or what some even call mega-disasters—like the Haiti earthquake and the floods in China and Pakistan, the majority of disasters in 2010 were “smaller” disasters. Those disasters, smaller in scope and scale, from the Philippines to Guatemala and from Niger to Venezuela, are also deadly, causing significant human suffering and displacement and had economic, social, and in some instances, political consequences.

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Authors

Elizabeth Ferris
Daniel Petz

Image Source: Â© Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Protecting Civilians in Disasters and Conflicts

Elizabeth Ferris — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:24:00 -0400

Policy Brief #182

Protection of people from oppressive governments, civil conflict and disasters has moved to the top of the international agenda. The United Nations Security Council authorized all measures necessary to protect civilians in Libya as the airstrikes began. Humanitarian agencies-working in more places and under more difficult conditions than ever before-are grappling with the aftermath of Japan's massive earthquake even as they are also working with displaced people in Haiti and Ivory Coast and responding to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Libya. And increasingly these agencies are not only trying to assist people through provision of relief items, but also trying to protect them. But with so many global organizations mobilizing to protect civilians when disasters strike and conflicts break out, the concept of protection has begun to lose its distinctive meaning.

Can anyone "do" protection? In The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action (Brookings Institution Press, 2011), I describe how protection has been stretched to include all manner of important activities-from provision of food to curriculum development, from advocacy to monitoring, from building latrines to voter registration. Beyond affirming the responsibility of governments to protect their people, international law offers no clear guidance on how to translate the principles of protection into action.

Given the likelihood that conflicts will continue and natural disasters will increase in the future, much more attention is needed on the question of protection, which has emerged over the years from international humanitarian law, refugee law and human rights law. The most visible part of the international humanitarian system is the vast array of U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Yet military forces, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and thousands of civil society organizations are also major actors in humanitarian response. This brief describes observations and recommendations on protection in humanitarian work culled from my forthcoming book.

	RECOMMENDATIONS
	With changes in the nature of conflict and with the likelihood of increasing severity and frequency of sudden-onset disasters because of climate change, more attention needs to be paid to understanding how humanitarian actors can-and cannot-protect people. The United Nations and other humanitarian actors should consider the following recommendations: Humanitarian agencies need to re-evaluate what protection means in the context of today's conflicts and to recognize their own limitations in keeping people safe. If they are serious about protecting people, they need to work with national military and police forces which have the resources to provide such physical protection. This is hard for humanitarian agencies that see their work as grounded in principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality. NGOs should review their current policies and practices on protection to ensure that they are not promising more than they can deliver or being used as a cover for the lack of effective political action. " As the term "protection of civilians" has come to mean different things for different actors, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs should develop a very short summary statement of what it means to protect civilians that can be broadly used by a range of different communities and individuals in different contexts. The office should then collect the best practices to illustrate how protection of civilians is effectively carried out on the ground. As both conflicts and disasters take on a distinctive form when they occur in urban areas, much more work is needed to retool humanitarian assistance for urban environments. This means that humanitarian agencies need to work with municipal authorities in preparing for and responding to urban residents affected by violence and disasters. In light of the fact that climate change is likely to result in more large-scale and varied types of displacement, U.N. agencies and researchers should analyze the gaps in international legal protection for those forced to leave their countries because of climate change-induced environmental factors. Guidelines should be developed to assist governments considering evacuation or relocation of populations from areas likely to be affected by natural disasters or climate change. Given the pace of technological change taking place with robotic armaments, the International Committee of the Red Cross should convene a group of experts from the military research and international law communities to begin to identify the gaps in international humanitarian law resulting from the widespread use of those technologies.

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Elizabeth Ferris

What Does Protection Mean When Disasters Strike?

Elizabeth Ferris — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:40:00 -0500

As humanitarian agencies begin to grapple with the scope of the massive earthquake that has hit Japan and continue to struggle helping the displaced people of Haiti and Pakistan after natural disasters there, and as political turmoil unfolds in North Africa, there is now a need more than ever for protection in the humanitarian world. I’ve always been a strong advocate of protection, so this recent call for increased action should make me confident. Instead, I am uneasy.

As I wrote in my book, The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action:

Uncomfortable questions emerge: Can anyone "do" protection? Can humanitarian action stop violence by determined warlords? When military troops vaccinate kids, is that protection? Does monitoring the number of rapes in a community actually protect women from being raped? As the concept has been stretched to include all manner of important activities—from provision of food to curriculum development, from advocacy to monitoring, from building latrines to voter registration—has the concept of protection begun to lose its distinctive meaning?

San Salvador, May 2010
From my journals

Red, yellow, orange and bright blue uniforms. Not the typical garb of Brookings workshop participants. They were the fire fighters, Red Cross, and first-line disaster responders in Central America. This seminar intended to examine how human rights were impacted in disaster response. Our wonderful partner, the Coordination Centre for the Prevention of Natural Disasters in Central America (CEPREDENAC), arranged a visit to communities affected by hurricanes, mudslides and flooding.

As we traveled by minibus through the lush Salvadoran countryside, my thoughts drifted away from speakers and agendas to a different world. We spoke with women who had lost children because the early warning system didn’t work—“the batteries were dead,” an official lamented. One mayor let out a big sigh and said that aid to his small village was delayed because he belonged to a different political party than the government. I spoke with the commander of a specialized military unit who responded with impatience when I talked of international human rights standards: “of course we want to do what is right, but when it’s 3 a.m. and the electricity is gone and the waters are rising and people don’t want to leave their homes, what is the right thing to do? Do we force them to leave against their will? Is it a violation of their human rights to force them to leave? Or do we leave them there to die?”

I didn’t have a good answer—there is no clear guidance from international law beyond affirming the responsibility of governments to protect their people. Protection issues aren’t easy, but struggling to translate principles into action is important. People deserve to be protected when disasters strike.

Elizabeth Ferris uses her experience from more than twenty years of humanitarian work to examine the complex ways of protecting people in The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action, which will be published by Brookings Institution Press in April.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Image Source: © Yomiuri Yomiuri / Reuters

A Research Trip to Haiti: Personal Reflections

Elizabeth Ferris — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:30:00 -0500

Travel in Haiti isn’t easy. There aren’t any taxis. The streets in Port-au-Prince are terribly bad — deep fissures everywhere, potholes the size of my bathroom, piles of earthquake rubble lining the edges of the streets and often big piles in the middle of the streets. I've been on many terrible roads in Africa, but this is the worst I've seen in a city. The traffic, of course, is terrible. It takes 3 1/2 to 4 hours to drive across the city. The five days I spent in Haiti were largely spent in the front seat of a bouncing jeep. I had a full schedule of meetings with U.N. and U.S. government aid workers and both Haitian and international NGOs. I went to Haiti to look at the situation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and to try to understand why it’s so difficult to find solutions for the people living in the 1,000 or so camps in Port-au-Prince.

You can’t miss the camps. They’re everywhere. Anywhere there was an open space after the earthquake is now filled with clusters of tents in varying stages of disrepair. In some ways they look like refugee camps — women washing clothes, men sitting around, kids kicking balls in the dust — but rather than being in isolated rural areas, they're sandwiched between gas stations, stands selling charcoal, and piles of rubble spilling on to the streets, remnants of houses toppled by the earthquake. But the IDP camps are not populated only by people who lost their homes in the earthquake. Lots of people — who knows how many — have come to the camps because services are better than in urban slums. There's no free food in the camps, but they generally have water. The camps have tarps or tents, even if they are pretty tattered after a year of use. There is a chance that a child living in a camp might be able to go to school or get antibiotics if they're sick. “People want to be IDPs,” someone said told me. “It's so much better than what they had.” It’s an indication of how desperate urban poverty is in Haiti that IDP camps are seen as preferred living options.

One afternoon I met with members of a Haitian NGO, called KOFAVIV, which works with 60 women “agents” — all of whom have been victims of sexual violence. The women work in the camps trying to prevent other attacks on women. The police are nowhere to be found. There is no electricity, and as a result, no lights. Women are raped every night when they go to the latrines. The main defense they've come up with are whistles — when a woman is threatened, she blows a whistle and other women come running out to try to stop the thugs. “The victims are getting younger,” one 15-year old KOFAVIV “agent” told me. “Orphan girls aged 5-7 are particularly at risk,” she said. Sadly, prostitution is growing, particularly among young girls. They get 50 cents a trick, I was told, and there is nowhere else an orphan can earn 50 cents or other means of support.

At the insistence of NGOs and UN agencies working in the Protection Cluster, the police arm of MINUSTAH (UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti) has begun to patrol those camps at greatest risk of violence. But their resources are limited; in fact, they’re only able to patrol a tenth of the IDP camps, and even then, “patrolling” only means driving around the perimeter of the camp once or twice a month. Not much protection for women living in flimsy tents where predators come out at night.

I had many meetings with humanitarian workers — all good people, pouring their hearts into the work, but conscious that it's not enough, not nearly enough. It's an impossible situation. They go into a camp and try to work through local IDP committees, but then discover that the “representative” committees are self-selected and often not at all representative of the camp’s inhabitants. Sometimes committee members don't even live in the camps. Even with these significant shortcomings, these committees determine who in the camps receive assistance. “We see particularly vulnerable people, like 80 and even 90-year old women who have nothing. We want to give them food rations, but the committees say 'no you can't single out people and if you give the old women food, they will be beaten and robbed,'” said a protection coordinator of a major NGO.

I was amazed at how frankly and how often people talk about defecation. Feces. USAID has provided latrines — porta-potties — for many of the camps, but these facilities are not sustainable. They need to be desludged (terrible word), people don't keep them clean, and they’re sites of violence. Private owners of the land where the IDPs live (understandably) don’t want permanent latrines dug, so the only options are the portable toilets. The preferred alternative, I’m told, is to go back to what people did in urban slums before the earthquake — provide plastic bags for people to defecate in and find a better way of disposing of them than throwing them in the nearest ravine. I'm struck by the contrast between the rhetoric of “building back better” and the thought of millions of plastic bags of feces being produced every day. I've had hundreds of conversations about “watsan” (water & sanitation) over the years, but this is the first time the discussions have been this widespread — and this graphic.

The humanitarian workers I talk with are all worried about the news reports likely to come around the one year anniversary. “The international community didn't perform well,” a very experienced NGO rep said. “We made lots of mistakes and people are paying for it.” But what no one is saying, and everyone is perhaps afraid to say, is that the Haitian government is largely absent when decisions are needed. They don’t show up for meetings, they don’t make decisions, they’re focused solely on the elections. Some mayors and municipal authorities are trying to help, but often they don’t have the authority to make needed decisions. The rubble hasn't been removed because the government hasn't identified sites to dump the stuff. Customs is a travesty — goods are held in storage for months — because there are economic “interests” at play. I’m told of the case of an NGO which couldn't get its trucks out of customs for months — and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent vehicles. It turns out the rental car agencies are in cahoots with the customs authorities. But the government gets 67 percent of its revenues from customs taxes, so of course there are economic interests to maximize revenues. Where else will the government get the revenues it so desperately needs? Property taxes — when only a small percentage of the land is legally registered? Income taxes when at least 80% of the population is unemployed? Sales tax when most of the transactions are carried out by illiterate people on the street?

“OK, Beth, let me ask you to make a guess,” a donor government representative official asked me. “What percentage of Haiti’s population has completed high school, including taking the mandatory end-of-high school test?” “Twenty percent?” I ventured, knowing it would be low. “Less than one percent,” he said. “Actually, it’s 0.8 percent.” What does that tell you about prospects for recovery?

The international presence is visible as evidenced by the legions of white four-wheel drive vehicles, many with a bold UN letters printed in black, others with marked with the acronyms of aid agencies. A visible sign of the international community’s concern. At some intersections where dozens of vehicles are gridlocked, you can identify the non-international vehicles on one hand. It reminds me of Cambodia in 1992 where I was amazed at the number of white Toyotas transporting relief workers. Like 1992 Cambodia, there’s popular resentment here at all this display of wealth in a land of desperate poverty. These vehicles cost at least $30-$40,000 each in a city where half the population makes less than $1 a day. But there’s no other way to get around.

The Logbase is the site at the airport constructed for the relief effort. It’s the home of MINUSTAH, UN agencies and other international agencies. It is surreal. The closest analogy is a temporary military base. There are new prefab containers everywhere — offices, barracks, stores. Military acronyms are interspersed with UN logos. The Chilean air force, IOM, the Japanese contingent, UNDP, the Uruguayan battalion, UNICEF. My driver let me off at the entrance to the Logbase, and I waited in line for 20 minutes to enter (I was the only woman, the only white person in the line). MINUSTAH security guards the entrance, and the bureaucracy is painfully slow. I had fixed appointments, I had my U.S. passport in hand, but the guard’s window was small and high, making it hard to hear the guard asking for information. Over and over again I said, in what I thought was at least passable French, “I have a meeting with M. Majekodunmi, Droits de l’Homme. He’s expecting me.” I never understood/heard the response through that high window, even though I leaned close to feel the cool air from the window on my face. “Do you have much Haitian participation in your coordination meetings,” I asked when I finally was able to find the protection cluster coordinator. “No,” he answered, “and it’s a shame.” His colleague chimed in “sometimes they get stuck like you did at security and have trouble finding us. Our meetings are only an hour long and the Haitians — who don’t have UN IDs — tend to arrive late. I think after three or four times they don’t think it’s worth it.” This is something I totally understand.

While walking through a camp of 1,800 displaced families, I ask the representative of the camp committee whether Haitian government officials visited the camp. “Never,” she said. “What about the mayor or other municipal authorities?” “No.” Another day, I talk with a Haitian pastor who heads a council of some 8,000 churches. “We’ve been totally excluded from the relief effort. Who knows what all these internationals are doing? It’s a new occupation of Haiti.” Certainly the NGOs are providing needed services, services the government can’t provide. Everyone recognizes that international effort substituting for the government lets political authorities off the hook. But what’s the alternative?

It's all terribly complicated. There are no easy answers or even clear villains.

As I wait in air conditioned comfort for my flight back to the United States, I wonder how many women will blow whistles when they're attacked in the dark camps tonight and how many won't even have whistles to blow.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Haiti and Future Humanitarian Disasters

Elizabeth Ferris — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:28:00 -0500

“Haiti is the humanitarian disaster of the future,” commented an aid agency representative last week in Port-au-Prince. “And our experience here demonstrates that we’re not ready for it.” Today’s one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake is generating a media blitz on the shortcomings of the international humanitarian response in Haiti, but this may be only the beginning.

Future humanitarian disasters are likely to occur in urban, not rural, areas and are likely to wreak particular havoc in countries least likely to be able to respond adequately. This is partly due to simple demographics. Half of the world’s population, some 3.3 billion people, currently live in urban areas—a figure that is expected to rise to 5 billion by 2030. Eighty percent of these urban dwellers will live in the developing world. One billion people, one-third of the urban population, presently live in slums which are usually located on land most vulnerable to the effects of sudden-onset disasters.

But the humanitarian system is largely unprepared for responding to urban disasters where there are multiple political actors, difficulties in distinguishing the displaced from the urban poor and a politically mobilized population.

Working in an urban environment is a more complex undertaking for humanitarian actors than running refugee camps in rural areas. Cities have multiple layers of government authorities with sometimes overlapping jurisdictions. There are many more private actors, ranging from large businesses to political associations, which operate in both the formal and informal sectors. It is more difficult to control the activities of non-governmental organizations working in hundreds of different urban communities than in rural camps. Urban violence tends to be concentrated in the poorer parts of cities which also tend to be those most affected by natural disasters.

Traditionally humanitarian efforts have focused on those who have been displaced by disaster and who have lost homes and livelihoods. But in Haiti it is hard to distinguish between those displaced by the earthquake and the urban poor. Many of those living in the more than 1,000 IDP camps in Haiti did not lose their homes in the earthquake, but rather moved from the slums into the camps in the hope that they might receive assistance there. As an aid representative told me last week, “everyone wants to be an IDP.” Even though the IDP camps are miserable places and even though free food distribution stopped in April, at least people living in the camps have some shelter (albeit mostly tattered tarps) and access to clean water. Sometimes they also have latrines, medical care and occasionally even access to education. And there are hundreds of thousands who are not displaced, but who have been gravely affected by the earthquake. While humanitarians have long recognized the importance of working with host communities as well as the displaced, the situation in Haiti takes this to a new dimension. There are displaced Haitians who are not homeless and homeless Haitians who are not displaced. It is hard to even distinguish the displaced from the broader urban community when the needs are so similar and so great.

Humanitarian actors are well-equipped to provide immediate life-saving relief—delivering water and tents, providing food and emergency health care. But they’re not very good at dealing with chronic structural poverty. They don’t have much experience in creating long-term jobs which are the key to getting people out of Port-au-Prince’s tent cities. That’s not what they were set up to do, but that’s what Haiti needs now.

Protecting people in urban areas, particularly when they’re spread throughout a huge city and particularly when the urban poor have never enjoyed police protection, is incredibly difficult. The Haitian police are almost completely absent from the IDP sites. Nor is there regular international police presence in the sites. Meanwhile sexual and gender-based violence has increased within the camps because of the congestion, the flimsy nature of ragged tarps, and the breakdown of the social fabric.

Finally, urban populations tend to be more political, more aware, and more demanding than rural populations, as evident in Haiti. Self-selected camp committees limit humanitarian action and there’s no way around them. One NGO reported being confronted by a member of a camp committee who charged “we saw on your website that your organization has raised a million more dollars for Haiti relief. Where’s the money?” A UN official noted wryly that a "spontaneous" demonstration developed in an IDP camp when a senior European government official arrived.

There are many lessons to be learned from the response to the Haitian earthquake but planning for future urban disasters has got to be high on the agenda.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Image Source: © Jorge Silva / Reuters

Haiti Recovery Mired by Security and Political Concerns

Elizabeth Ferris — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:23:00 -0500

At a recent Brookings event marking the one-year anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake, Elizabeth Ferris says that finding solutions to the ongoing crisis in the country is complicated by fluctuating populations in the displacement camps, security concerns for the displaced Haitians, and fears that upcoming elections will result in additional instability.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Image Source: © Eliana Aponte / Reuters

Haiti: One Year After the Earthquake

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 14:00:00 -0500

Event Information

January 10, 2011
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

One year since the earthquake that devastated Haiti, the government and people of Haiti continue to experience a multitude of hardships. Massive displacement, a devastated infrastructure and the recent outbreak of cholera have all spurred the international humanitarian community into action. However, even with the mobilization of major relief efforts, many problems remain that will challenge reconstruction efforts for years to come.

On January 10, the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement and InterAction hosted a discussion marking the anniversary of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Sean Penn, founder of J/P Haitian Relief Organization and Paul Weisenfeld, USAID senior deputy assistant administrator, opened the discussion, offering their individual assessments of the current situation in Haiti. Following their remarks, Samuel A. Worthington, president and CEO of InterAction; Elizabeth Ferris, senior fellow at Brookings; and Claude Jeudy, Haiti national director at Habitat for Humanity; each offered insights based on their recent trips to the island nation.

Senior Fellow Theodore Piccone, deputy director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, moderated the discussion. After the program, the panelists took questions from the audience.

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Haiti: One Year After the Earthquake

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20110110_haiti_transcript

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Sean Penn

Founder, J/P Haitian Relief Organization

Paul Weisenfeld

Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, USAID

Samuel A. Worthington

President and CEO, InterAction

Claude Jeudy

Haiti National Director, Habitat for Humanity

Haiti: Assessing Political and Humanitarian Developments

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:30:00 -0500

Event Information

December 14, 2010
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

NOTE: The start time for this event has been changed from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM.

Last January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti continues to have serious consequences for both the humanitarian work in Haiti and the country’s long-term political development. The displacement of more than 1.5 million people, the devastation of the country’s infrastructure, and most recently, the outbreak of cholera not only challenge humanitarian and development actors, but also the political system. Recent presidential and parliamentary elections were expected to yield a new government capable of effectively leading the country’s recovery. They have been affected, however, by claims of fraud and corruption that cast serious doubts upon the results and the country's political future. The humanitarian challenges are many: 1.3 million people are still displaced in camps where violence–particularly against women–has become endemic and prospects for ending displacement seem remote.

On December 14, the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement will host a discussion surveying the humanitarian situation in Haiti as the one-year anniversary of the earthquake approaches. The panel will explore efforts to protect women at risk and the need to create durable solutions for the large population that remains displaced.

After the program, participants will take audience questions.

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Haiti: Assessing Political and Humanitarian Developments

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201011214_haiti

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Sophie Lagueny

Chief of Party, Haiti
International Foundation for Electoral Systems

Ambassador Albert R. Ramdin

Assistant Secretary General
Organization of American States

Jim Swigert

Senior Associate and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean
National Democratic Institute

Vincent Cochetel

Regional Representative
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Holly Mackey

Foreign Affairs Officer, Office of the Special Coordinator for Haiti
U.S. Department of State

Jocie Philistin

Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim (KOFAVIV), Haiti

Sarah Petrin Williamson

Director of International Programs
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

When Disaster Strikes: Women's Particular Vulnerabilities and Amazing Strengths

Elizabeth Ferris — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Disasters, whether triggered by natural hazards or human behavior or by the interaction between the two, affect millions of people for long periods of time. Often the effects last for decades after the disaster has long disappeared from our headlines and evening news. This presentation explores some of the particular issues affecting women in disasters --- both the specific vulnerabilities they face but also the amazing strengths which they bring to recovery efforts. And since we’re in New Orleans, I’m going to make reference to Hurricane Katrina, but also to the current disasters in Haiti and Pakistan.

First, let me say that there’s a bit of a controversy about using the term ‘natural disasters’ because it’s always a combination of natural hazards and human action that cause a disaster which is usually defined as: “the consequences of events triggered by natural hazards that overwhelm local response capacity and seriously affect the social and economic development of a region.”[1]

The number and severity of disasters (particularly hydrometeorological disasters which includes cyclones, floods, hurricanes, etc) is increasing as a result of climate change. In the course of 2009, there were 335 natural disasters worldwide which killed 10,655 persons, affected more than 119 million others and caused over US$ 41.3 billion economic damages.[2] This was considered a relatively quiet year in comparison with recent years. For example, in 2008, disasters took the lives of more than 235,000 people, affected 214 million and resulted in economic losses of over $190 billion.[3] And we know that 2010 is going to go down as a particularly bad year with the megadisasters of Haiti and Pakistan.

As Margareta Wahlström pointed out in 2007, “over the past 30 years, climate-related disasters – storms, floods and droughts – have increased threefold according to the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).”[4] Some of these disasters are large, high-profile disasters which are well-covered by the media and attract significant amounts of international assistance, but most are much smaller in scale and never make it to the front pages of international newspapers. The cumulative impact of smaller-scale disasters can be as devastating to a community as a large one-time catastrophic event and yet generate far less response. Often the news coverage of a particular disaster is determined by what other news events are taking place at the same time. Thus, “…when Hurricane Stan hit Guatemala roughly a month after Hurricane Katrina, it resulted in a similar number of fatalities but generated only a fraction of the media coverage and subsequent aid response.”[5]

[1] Inter-Agency Standing Committee, Protecting Persons affected by Natural Disasters: IASC Operational Guidelines on Human Rights and Natural Disasters, Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, June 2006

[2] Vos, Rodriguez, Below, Guha-Sapir. “Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2009: The numbers and Trends,” p. 1. Centre for research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, World Health Organization, Université Catholique de Louvain, available at: http://cred.be

[3] Vos, Rodriguez, Below, Guha-Sapir. “Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2008: The numbers and Trends,” p. 1. Centre for research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, World Health Organizatio, Université Catholique de Louvain, available at: http://cred.be

[4] Margareta Wahlström, “The Humanitarian Impact of Climate Change,” UN Chronicle Online Edition,available at: www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2007

[5] IFRC, World Disasters Report, 2006, p. 168.

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Publication: National Council of Churches Assembly

Natural Disasters and Human Rights: Comparing Responses to Haiti and Pakistan

Elizabeth Ferris — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This presentation was conducted at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, MA.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about natural disasters and human rights with a particular focus on international responses to Haiti and Pakistan. I’d like to begin with 4 general statements about natural disasters and human rights, then give a brief overview comparing the response to the two disasters but spend most of my time talking about some of the larger issues – ethical issues if you will – raised by the comparison between these two responses.

GENERAL COMMENTS

Disasters aren’t so natural. I’m using the term natural disasters as a sort of short-hand for the more accurate but more awkward phrase "disasters resulting from natural hazards." In reality, disasters are almost always the result of both natural phenomena and human action. For example, mudslides increase in Nepal as a result of both glacier runoff (a natural cause) and deforestation (a man-made cause). We could take this a step further and ask to what extent was the breaching of the levees in New Orleans the result of Hurricane Katrina or the failure of U.S. authorities to take preventive actions to protect its citizens?
There have always been natural disasters of course, but they are increasing in severity and intensity as a result of climate change. And yet the reality is that the international humanitarian system is not prepared to cope with more than one large-scale disaster a year.
Disasters always hurt the poor and marginalized more than others. The poor tend to live in less sturdy housing and on marginal land. Similarly while disasters in developed countries tend to have high economic costs, they generally result in lower casualties than those taking place in developing societies. For example, in August 2010, New Zealand had an earthquake measuring over 7.0 on the Richter scale which destroyed 100,000 homes. No one was killed. Recovery is faster in wealthier countries. Access to assistance is often more readily available and the delivery of that assistance is easier with paved roads and multiple communication networks. The spread of disease is less likely when medicine is on hand, sanitation can be addressed, and functioning hospitals are nearby.
Assistance is not neutral. In fact, sometimes the response itself can exacerbate inequities. The way in which a government responds to natural disasters is often politically motivated and almost always has political consequences. If aid is not distributed in an impartial fashion, ethnic, class or religious resentments and conflicts can intensify.

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From Relief to Development: Next Steps for Education in Haiti

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 14, 2010
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

In the 10 months since the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, humanitarian relief and recovery have been the primary focus of work on the ground. In the education sector, schools and classrooms have been rehabilitated, teachers have been retrained, and children have received necessary learning materials. Yet, these activities have only reached a subset of the population and represent only a small portion of what is needed to rehabilitate and renew education in Haiti. At the same time, the Haitian government, with the support of the international community, has developed a comprehensive education sector strategy, which has recently been approved by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.

On October 14, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted a discussion of education in Haiti since the January earthquake. Panelists include Marcelo Cabrol of the Inter-American Development Bank, Lisa Doherty of UNICEF, and Peter Holland of the World Bank. They also reflected on coordination efforts, including the work of the Education Cluster, the inter-agency group which organizes responses in education during humanitarian emergencies, and the transition from emergency relief to longer-term recovery and development.

Brookings Nonresident Fellow Allison Anderson provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. After the program, the panelists took audience questions.