Poverty Caused By Natural Disasters Is Able To Prevent

LIMA CITY, Peru – Latin American countries are looking for strengthening their systems of social protection in case of natural disasters due to  they seem to turn more frequent and intense, what put the life of the people and the economy of every territory under risk. In consequence, they can slow down the advance in reduction of poverty.

The Latin American countries are mostly exposed to natural disasters, what motivated the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS as in Spanish), the World Bank, and the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) join to organize a forum for sharing practices and learned lessons  about  the adaptative mechanisms  of social protection that allow to innovate management tools which benefit the poorest and vulnerable population.

The officials and experts of 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the specialists from participant institutions focused on analyzing adaptative systems of social protection that have the purpose of minimizing the impacts of natural disasters in vulnerable targets. MIDIS’ Minister Paola Bustamante predicted  they are thinking about  a resilience strategy for non-poor people who can fall in poverty due to natural disasters. WFP’s top oficial Tania Goossens says there is already one and it is being applied on almost affected population.

“Only for instance, in 2017, in facts happened in Peru, Dominica, and Mexico, the impact of those disasters reached 100 casualties and  US$ 12 billion in losses,” World Bank’s Alberto Rodríguez said.

In the last 15 years, Latin America and the Caribbean  have reached remarkable advances in reducing poverty and increasing the medium class. However, before a climatic or geophysical shock, the transitory poverty can increase significantly because the homes use strategies to mitigate the impacts of the disaster such as the reduction of incomes or the sell of family and productive assets.

Natural Rage

In 2017, Maria Hurricane smashed Dominica causing damages and losses raising 226% of its gross domestic product (GDP)  (US$ 1.3 billion), leaving 27 casualties  and 60 missing people at least, damaging 90% of homes in the country. In the same year, Peru experienced one of the major disasters in the last 20 years – Coastal ElNiño. This phenomenom had very important social and economic effects – 114 died people, more than 200.000 damaged people, more than a million of affected people, and a 8-billion-dollar reconstruction cost, approximately.

In that period, Mexico also faced two tropical storms, three hurricanes, and two big-magnitude earthquakes in a 2-month lapse. Those events resulted in more than 470 casualties, affected more than 12 million people, and caused damages and losses for approximately US$ 2.5 billion. In Central America, the increase of hurricanes intensity can cause losses between 0.9% and 1.6% of GDP.

The region has a tradition in setting up non-deductible systems of social protection focused on the poor and vulnerable population. This represents an unique opportunity to use the programmes and systems of social protection as means to increase the resilience of poorest and most vulnerable homes, minimizing the impact of natural disasters and climate change this way.

The World Bank  and other international organisms are giving technical assistance to set up flexible systems of social protection in many Latin American and Caribbean countries. In the same way, since 2015, the WFP’s regional strategy targets to strengthen the national systems of social protection and to promote a social protection for being more reactive before disasters, productive and adaptative too, and sensitive to nutrition either.

The Peruvian Government, through the MIDIS, is working now to be one of the pioneers in adequatting its social protection systems by incorporating the disasters risk management in favor of the most vulnerable population in the country.

The photos on this post were provided by the MIDIS.