Home 
Publications Catalog Online Publications ADB Review Article
Floods and the Poor
|
In many parts of the Asia and Pacific region, floods are part of the normal weather cycle.
In Bangladesh, for example, floods typically inundate large parts of the country every year. Major floods in 1987 and 1988 submerged most of that country and affected tens of millions of people. Floods also regularly hit Cambodia, People’s Republic of China, Philippines, and Viet Nam.
Asians are accustomed to recurrent floods and have adapted their lives to cope with such events, notes Geert van der Linden, Director General, East and Central Asia Department, ADB.
“Nevertheless, their suffering should never be underestimated,” he told participants at the Poverty and Floods workshop held at ADB in October 2002.
The workshop was jointly sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport; Japan International Cooperation Agency; Secretariat of the 3rd World Water Forum; and Government of the Netherlands through the ADB Water Fund.
Floods cost the poor much in terms of days of lost employment, damage to houses and property, loss of livestock, and destruction of crops. The poor also pay dearly in terms of ill health, and sometimes loss of life.
The majority of Asians affected annually by floods have incomes of less than $1 a day. Their low income exacerbates their vulnerability to floods and prevents them from breaking out of the poverty cycle.
STEMMING FLOWS Flood interventions should not be made in isolation of each other
Some communities have adapted to cope with small recurrent floods. These are floods that result in slow, predictable rises in water levels, and equally slow recession of waters after the peak flood has passed.
If incorporated into flood management projects, these indigenous coping mechanisms may offer opportunities to minimize the disruption caused by floods.
ADB supports participation by poor communities affected by these types of floods to be fully engaged in planning and implementing flood mitigation and flood management projects.
“It is important to understand that floods are not necessarily disasters,” notes Mr. van der Linden. For example, the floods that cover large parts of Bangladesh every year are essential to the farming system because they bring water and nutrients to regenerate soil fertility, replenish groundwater, and rejuvenate wetlands forming the natural breeding grounds of diverse aquatic plants, fish, and animals.
Flooded areas provide a habitat for the fish that are so important in Bangladeshi diets. The livelihoods of boat people, fisherfolk, jute processors, and many others who own little or no land are directly related to the annual cycle of flooding.
Floods have often been considered only in terms of the threat they present to people and economic opportunity, and much money has been spent building costly barriers to keep water inside river channels and away from people and infrastructure.
This was the era of engineering solutions based on flood containment. The thinking was that if a small amount of flood containment is good, a large amount must be even better.
Current thinking still suggests that urban areas need such physical protection from massive inundation. However, total flood containment is neither realistic nor desirable in rural areas where expensive flood-control embankments prevent the frequent replenishment of nutrients in floodplains and interfere with wetland ecosystems.
River embankment systems built to contain large floods are detrimental to the livelihoods of poor people. In addition, such embankments on parts of a river system often have unintended negative impacts on other parts of the river.
These include the worsening of floods in areas previously not affected, and the placing at risk of large numbers of people living in the shadow of high embankments.
ADB’s challenge, notes Mr. van der Linden, is to capitalize on the benefits of frequent low-intensity floods while, at the same time, relieving the impact of catastrophic events.
Modern technology allows us to predict severe weather and give advance warning to people under threat.
“New thinking on the design of infrastructure shows promise that effective design can enhance positive aspects of flooding while also preventing sudden unpredictable rises in water or other life-threatening outflows from rivers,” he says. By involving vulnerable people in awareness and planning, emergency evacuation can be achieved more efficiently.
There is enormous scope in Asia to make houses less vulnerable to floods, provide shelters from both storm surges and unusually deep floods, and establish a network of evacuation roads for people and livestock.
There is also potential to develop effective and affordable flood damage insurance for crops and property that can be financed entirely from beneficiary contributions.
With flood management, as with all other measures to make water an asset rather than a liability for the poor, no single intervention should be made in isolation, the ADB director general notes.
“The starting point must be a better understanding of all aspects of affected people’s livelihoods, and not just solutions based on the assumption that outsiders know better than local people how to manage rivers and their waters,” he says. “We must work to integrate all uses of water—including the maintenance of ecosystems—within the natural flows of river basins, which in many regions include annual flooding,”
The frequency of floods in Asia and the Pacific has been increasing, and with higher water levels being measured with every new flood, more people are being affected. Floods affect not only the poor: in some cases, flooding has caused people with marginally higher incomes to descend into poverty as a result of flood-related losses.
Poverty itself creates conditions that result in greater damage from these natural disasters, as destitution removes choice. The poor live where no one else will, often in areas known to be prone to annual flooding.
Living in such flood-risk areas often prevents the residents from saving, investing in more permanent income-earning activities, or spending what little money they have on fixtures for their dwellings.
Improving flood management helps ease the cycle of poverty, and makes good fiscal sense. The issue of poverty and floods will be discussed during the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto in March 2003, covering such issues as how floods affect the poor, and how flood management projects optimize indigenous coping mechanisms while reducing the negative environmental and social effects of flood control structures such as embankments or dikes.
The poorest people in society are often the most affected by water problems, yet access to water can greatly improve their quality of life. This is one of the great ironies of this vital resource.
We need water for life yet, in excess, water also has the power to destroy life and severely disrupt livelihoods.
Flood management can be seen as a way out of poverty rather than a factor that perpetuates poverty.Find out how ADB and its partners address the problem on water in the Asia-Pacific region
Visit our Water site
© 2009 Asian Development Bank Privacy | Terms of Use |
 Top of page |