Knud Falk/Danish Red Cross

Chapter 5 - summary
Building community resilience to disaster in the Philippines

Landslides across southern Philippines in December 2003 killed 200 people and left thousands homeless, reigniting the disaster prevention debate. From 1971 to 2000, 'natural' disasters killed 34,000 Filipinos. From 1990 to 2000, 35 million people were severely affected by natural disasters. Can community-based disaster preparedness (CBDP) help strengthen the resilience of Filipinos to natural hazards? What are CBDP's pitfalls and advantages?

Disaster data fail to capture the full extent of damage inflicted by smaller, recurrent hazards such as typhoons, which strike once a month during the storm season. Typhoons bring high winds and heavy rainfall, which destroy crops, livestock and property, eroding soils and littering farmland with silt and stones. Farmers and agricultural labourers suffer most. Flood debris must be cleared before replanting. And the change in cropping seasons can lead to further damage from floods, droughts or pests. Demand for agricultural labour drops as small farmers economise. Typhoon damage discourages farmers from investing in improving their plantations.

Recurrent disasters frequently destroy poor quality housing, cause outbreaks of disease and create shortages of food and medicine, driving up prices. Many people can't afford to invest in recovery, as income-earning opportunities are scarce following disaster. Disaster impacts aggravate pre-existing poverty, creating a downward spiral of vulnerability, arresting development.

Since 1994, the Philippines Red Cross (PNRC) has shifted from disaster response to community disaster preparedness. Projects identify villages prone to typhoons, then train volunteers in disaster preparedness (DP). Village officials and DP trainees are encouraged to produce disaster action plans, which lead to small mitigation measures such as: mangrove and tree planting, seawall and river dike construction, clearing irrigation channels, sand-bagging sections of rivers, and building evacuation centres. Initiatives are planned with the participation of community members and local government units (LGUs). LGUs help meet the costs or technical requirements.

While, physical mitigation measures help protect lives and property, the PNRC sees the main value of CBDP in the process by which it is implemented. Concrete project outputs have symbolic value, illustrating the achievements of villagers. Participating in CBDP increases local knowledge and skills. Implementing projects raises awareness of what can be done locally. And CBDP helps consolidate links between communities, the Red Cross and government officials. Reactions have been positive. In Leyte, one volunteer described how the training helped him become "convinced of the power that individual DP volunteers and community members have" to change their situation.

However, there are difficulties associated with CBDP:

• Projects focus on short-term outputs, rather than long-term outcomes, due to funding constraints and pressure to provide quick evidence of project success.
• CBDP can be a burden, requiring participants to sacrifice time, energy and other job opportunities.
• Several factors compromise sustainability. Some volunteers migrate in search of employment within months of their DP training. Others forget their training if it isn't applied.
• Mitigation structures don't adequately address livelihoods. The hazard-based approach fails to focus on factors underlying vulnerability - leading to 'event-centric' mitigation.
• CBDP can be disempowering, by raising expectations without increasing local capacity to address root causes of vulnerability. Participants may be steered away from linking DP to bigger, politically contentious issues that drive vulnerability. Politicians may use CBDP to avoid responsibility for reducing vulnerability.

Clearer assessments of the factors creating vulnerability (and resilience) to disaster could lead to better interventions and advocacy. Filipinos are vulnerable to disasters for three reasons. First, their livelihoods are vulnerable, due to shortage of jobs, low wages, declining natural resources, decreasing profitability of rice farming and inequitable tenancy arrangements. Second, patterns of natural resource use are changing, as urban development and commercial quarrying and logging degrade the environment. Third, people are poor and marginalized, making it difficult for them to access resources such as development loans or land.

Equally important is understanding how local people cope with and recover from disaster, and how different groups have different needs and capacities. During crises, many households eat cheaper home-grown produce such as bananas and root crops, rather than more valuable rice and fish. They call on family and friends for financial support or help finding work. They diversify their livelihoods - sometimes finding work abroad. They get involved in local cooperatives which offer low-cost goods, savings schemes and loans for micro-enterprise - as well as affordable credit in times of crisis.

For CBDP initiatives to have an impact on reducing vulnerability, they must be positioned within wider development planning. However, the divide between disaster management and development is very real for donors, NGOs and government agencies. For example, the donor to a PNRC project in Benguet province prematurely cut back support, after concluding that the project's income-generation elements were not sufficiently focused on disaster mitigation. However, local participants considered these initiatives valid because they addressed wider aspects of vulnerability. Unfortunately, funding for livelihoods-based initiatives in a CBDP context remains scarce - due to the relatively high expense of livelihoods projects compared to DP and because donors want to maintain the disaster/development divide.

The challenge for humanitarian organizations is to avoid imposing on communities a pre-conceived agenda of physical mitigation measures, to be completed within donor-driven timelines. Only a careful analysis of both the hazards and the social, political and economic reasons underlying resilience and vulnerability can provide the basis for framing the right interventions. Such an analysis will raise far more problems (and expectations) than any single organization can solve. So humanitarian organizations must cooperate with other agents, from local to international levels, with expertise in different sectors.

CBDP does not provide a complete solution, but it can play an important role in enabling local communities to protect themselves from disaster. Some recommendations for humanitarian actors:

• Analyse the root causes of vulnerability to disaster;
• Understand the strengths of local livelihoods and capacities;
• Listen to community perspectives and priorities;
• Include other actors to share the burden of risk reduction;
• Advocate around issues that the community itself cannot tackle; and
• Advocate the integration of risk reduction into development planning.

The principal contributor to this chapter and the box was Katrina Allen, a research associate in the sociology department at the University of Leicester, UK. The chapter draws primarily on research carried out during 1998-2002. The project was funded by the International Federation and supported by the PNRC and the Flood Hazard Research Centre, Middlesex University, UK.