Floods and the Poor
Opening Remarks delivered during the Regional Consultation Workshop on Poverty and Floods
ADB Headquarters, Manila, Philippines, 17-18 October 2002
Gerry van der Linden
Director General of the East and Central Asia Regional Department, Asian Development Bank
Distinguished Guests, Participants, Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Asian Development Bank, I warmly welcome you all to this Regional Consultation Workshop on Poverty and Floods.
We are very pleased to co-host this event with our partner organizations and joint sponsors, Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Secretariat of the 3rd World Water Forum, and the Government of the Netherlands. Thank you all for helping to bring us together for this important workshop.
I want to extend a special welcome to the community representatives and case study presenters who will share good news and lessons learned about actions taken in their localities around the region to improve flood management. And to the rest of you participants, welcome.
In August this year, floods deluged Eastern Europe in a disaster that was historically catastrophic. The fact that such floods are rare occurrences in Europe was little comfort to families who lost their homes, farmers who lost their crops, museums that lost art treasures, and the many enterprises whose activities were severely disrupted.
But elsewhere in the world, such as here in the Philippines and in other parts of Asia, floods are part of the normal weather cycle. Floods in Bangladesh typically inundate large parts of the country every year, and the major floods in 1987, 1988, submerged most of the country and affected tens of millions of people.
Asians are used to recurrent floods and have adapted their lives to cope with such events. Nevertheless, their suffering should never be underestimated. They pay a large price in days of lost employment, the damage to houses and property, loss of livestock, and destruction of crops. In many instances, they also pay dearly in terms of ill-health and sometimes they pay the ultimate price: loss of life.
The vast majority of the millions of Asians affected annually by floods have incomes of less than $1 dollar a day. This level of income exacerbates their vulnerability to floods and gives no opportunity for them to break out of the cycle of poverty. They cope as best they can. Some communities have developed ways of life that are well adapted to the situation of small recurrent floods These are floods that result in slow, predictable rises in water level. And equally slow receding waters after the peak flood has passed. If incorporated into flood management projects, these indigenous coping mechanisms, offer opportunities for minimizing the disruption caused by floods. Hence, we at ADB believe that poor communities need to be fully involved in planning and implementing flood mitigation and flood management projects.
Now it is important to understand that floods are not necessarily disasters. 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 boatmen, professional fishermen, 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 a large amount of money has been spent building costly barriers to keep water inside the river channels and out of the way of people and infrastructure. This old thinking was the era of engineering solutions based on flood containment. The thinking was that if a small amount of flood containment is good, then a large amount must be even better.
Current thinking suggests that urban areas do need such physical protection from massive inundation. On the other hand, total flood containment is neither realistic nor desirable in rural areas where expensive flood control embankments prevent the frequent replenishment of nutrients in flood plains and interfere with the ecosystems of wetlands. River embankment systems built that aim 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.
The challenge 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. Furthermore, by involving vulnerable people in awareness and planning, emergency evacuation can be achieved efficiently.
There is enormous scope in Asia to make houses less vulnerable to floods, to provide shelters from both storm surges and unusually deep floods, and to 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 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. 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 includes annual flooding.
Floods in Asia have recently become more frequent and with every new flood, higher levels are measured.
More and more people are affected through homelessness, injury, disease, loss of property, and death. 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 build and they often live with the certainly of annual flooding. This prevents them from saving and from investing in more permanent income-earning activities or fixtures of any sort. Floods often cause marginally better-off people to descend into poverty as a result of flood-related losses, and the sad cycle continues.
Attention to improving flood management actually eases the cycle of poverty and makes good fiscal sense. A commonly used estimate is that one dollar spent on prevention avoids three dollars lost to flood-related relief, especially if efforts are made to incorporate integrated structural and non-structural flood control measures.
The issue of poverty and floods will also be discussed during the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto next March, and much of what you do here over the next two days will be shared there. How do floods affect the poor? How can flood management projects optimize indigenous coping mechanisms while reducing the negative environmental and social effects of flood control structures, such as embankments or dikes? At this workshop you will look at some examples of successful social protection measures to soften the negative impact of unpredicted flooding.
The poorest in society are hardest hit by all water problems, not the least among them are floods? yet access to water also brings great improvement to their lives. 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 livelihood.
Focusing on the needs and potentials of the poor in flood management will be at the heart of your discussions. I wish you an extremely productive two days and I look forward to seeing your plan for bringing this important topic forward at the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto early next year.
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