Aid Groups Hope Post-Tsunami World More Generous

Planet Ark : Aid Groups Hope Post-Tsunami World More Generous

The Indian Ocean tsunami has triggered the most generous outpouring of humanitarian aid in history, making relief groups hopeful of a basic shift in the way the world reacts to desperately needy people.


In all, governments, aid groups, businesses and individuals have pledged $8 billion to $9 billion for tsunami relief in just eight weeks after an earthquake and wall of water devastated coastlines from Somalia to Thailand Dec. 26.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says governments, international agencies and relief groups alone have notified it of $5.7 billion in donations.

Tsunamis and Reckless Resource Extraction – The Unknown Link

Salimah Valiani

Northern American consumers – whether in coastal cities in the winter or prairie towns far from the sea - have in the past ten years enjoyed affordable frozen shrimp, no matter the season. Few of these consumers know that this has been due to the rise of shrimp farming in mangrove forests of Asian and Latin American countries, where governments have opted for quick export industry development. Even fewer know the link between this type of intensified resource extraction and the immense impact of recent tsunamis in Asia.

According to the Mangrove Action Project (MAP), which has been opposing unsustainable development since 1992, great losses in human life and suffering could have been averted had healthy mangrove forests, coral reefs, sea grass beds and peatlands been conserved along the tsunami-devastated coastlines of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.

Scientific simulations show that the destructive force of a 15 meter tsunami is greatly dissipated if it passes through coastal zones containing coral, sea grass and mangroves. These zones act as natural buffers protecting land, coastal communities and wildlife from the brunt of storms and waves.

Corroborating this scientific evidence are the tsunami experiences in India. About 300 km south of Chennai, in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu, six village hamlets located within 100 to 1000 metres of the Pichavaram mangrove wetlands did not face any tsunami damage due to the physical protection offered by the mangrove. As a fisherman of the hamlets explains, “We saved the mangrove by restoring it and it saved our life and property by protecting us.”
A report of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation of Chennai further explains that the velocity of the tsunami water was greatly reduced due to friction created by the thickness of the mangrove forest. Additionally, the tsunami water was distributed to canals and creeks throughout the mangrove, thus reducing its impact.
The experience of the six hamlets protected by the mangrove – comprising a population of about 6191 – differs significantly from that of the five hamlets located on or near to the open beach, which were totally devastated. A total of 17 hamlets were making use of the resources of the Pichavaram mangrove wetlands, which occupies an area of some 1400 hectares.

Besides being ‘greenbelts of protection’, mangroves play a vital role in reducing sedimentation and shoreline erosion. They also enhance fishing and farming communities with wild fisheries, marine life, medicines, fruit, honey, lumber, fuel wood, tannins and aesthetic beauty. But unlike the Pichavaram mangrove in India, mangrove forests in Southeast Asia have been lost, along with over half of the world’s mangroves.

MAP’s co-founder Pisit Charnsnah, of Thailand’s Yadfon Association explains, “The mangrove is the supermarket for the coastal poor, and that market has been replaced by another man-made enterprise whereby the goods produced are earmarked for export, and the local communities suffer the consequences of reduced wild fisheries and increased threats from natural disasters.”

In addition to industrial shrimp aquaculture, mangrove forests and corral reefs have been destroyed or diminished through the expansion of tourism, mining and logging industries – all of which has been encouraged by international financial institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

“Mining is one major reason for coastal degradation in the Philippines” says Clemente Bautista of Kalikasan, the People’s Network for the Environment. Denuding of mangrove forests has been caused by soil erosion and heavy siltation (i.e. fine earth and sand carried by water), which in turn are occurring due to intensified mining and logging since the early 1990s.

Similarly in Aceh, Indonesia - the area closest to the epicentre of the earthquake which caused the recent tsunamis – where over 100,000 have been killed, petroleum and shrimp exploitation for export have been central to government development policies.

Just prior to the earthquake in late December, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry increased the annual allowable cut for Indonesia’s forests by 400 per cent, without providing any ecological justification. Policy makers and advocates in Indonesia and around the world would do better to demonstrate they have learned from the recent catastrophe by incorporating the analysis of WALHI-Friends of the Earth Indonesia. Given that inappropriate development made the impact of the tsunami worse in areas where coral reefs and mangrove forests were destroyed, WALHI points-out, “it is essential that reconstruction plans and activities do not repeat these patterns, or create other negative environmental impacts.”

January 2005

Does disaster sell?

Seven storms right to the top

ESCAPISM or realism? It is hard to define a disaster blockbuster in a post-tsunami world but television viewers had a good look at one on Sunday night.

Category 6: Day Of Destruction was a four-hour epic about hurricane and tornado systems combining to bring destruction across the US.

Building A "New Nation"

Building a "New Nation" - Renton de Alwis

Most gave without seeking anything in return, while some others sought to brand their efforts. Nevertheless, they were all real and met the needs of the hour.

The tsunami, with all its destructive force emptied on us, had brought us all together; given all of us the realisation of the truism that, ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ – a realisation and a reality that the pre-tsunami world of the Sri Lankan polity had refused to accept.

World Social Forum 2005

World Social Forum 2005: An Irish Eyewitness Report - International Rights and Freedoms

The fifth World Social Forum (WSF) which took place last week in Porto Alegre, Brazil was a vital event for all those who are concerned with the state of the World. The WSF showed clearly that five years on from the Seattle protests, the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement continues to grow in strength and importance. 120,000 registered for the forum, almost 200,000 took part in the opening march and 352 proposals and calls for action came out of the more than 2000 panels and workshops that took place.

The WSF was post-tsunami in the pre-tsunami era.

Planning for a post-tsunami world

Communities planning their future in a post-tsunami world

The recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean has left islanders around the world thinking about their vulnerability. While our sympathies lie with those affected nations, and as we continue to provide assistance and immediate relief to them, sometimes our minds turn to the previously unimagined scenario of a series of 10-metre high tsunami waves barreling towards our
islands.

Should we just continue to go on the same way as before? Concentrating our development on the coast and near to the beaches, responding to the perceived needs of our tourist markets?...

Community visioning, put simply, is a process whereby communities lay out a blueprint, or vision statement, for future changes they want to see, they then prepare and implement a plan to meet their needs. Community visioning has been used successfully in Moloka'i and Hawaii, and Palauan communities are hoping it will work for them....

Arthur C. Clarke on the tsunami's aftermath

Letter from Sri Lanka - Wired

The New Year dawned with the global family closely following the unfolding tragedy via satellite television and the Web. As the grim images from Banda Aceh, Chennai, Galle, and elsewhere replaced the traditional scenes of celebrations, I realized that it would soon be 60 years since I conceived the communications satellite (in Wireless World, October 1945 -- I still think it was a good idea).

Re-imaging God in a post-tsunami world

Re-imaging God in a post-tsunami world - John Shelby Spong - Catholic New Times

The theistic God, because of great advances in human knowledge, has been rendered unbelievable.

A natural catastrophe like the tsunami brings these issues dramatically and urgently into full view. The defenders of the traditional understanding of God try to make sense out of this tragedy by postulating a deserving guilt on the part of its victims or by telling us that the will of God in this tragedy will be made clear in time. These arguments are simply not convincing...

Reporters on the Job

Reporters on the Job - Christian Science Monitor.com

Gone Fishing: To find out what was happening to India's fishermen in the post-tsunami world, correspondent Nachammai Raman first called a non- governmental group who works in a local fishing village near Madras, India. "I checked to see if they were getting back to work. Then, I arranged to see for myself," she says....