Disaster relief works like this: There is a flood, a drought, an earthquake, a famine, an exodus of refugees. Reporters swarm in, broadcasting images of suffering. Humanitarian workers on the ground analyze who needs what relief and draw up plans. The government asks for help. The United Nations coordinates international pledges. Relief comes in — money, bags of grain, medical supplies.
But by that point, weeks or months have gone by.
Rarely is there preplanning, pre-fundraising, or pre-agreement on a plan. “This is medieval,” said Stefan Dercon, a professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former chief economist of Britain’s bilateral aid agency, the Department for International Development. He and Daniel Clarke, head of the London-based Center for Disaster Protection, wrote the book “Dull Disasters? How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference.”
“It is as if financial instruments such as insurance do not exist,” they wrote. “This is begging-bowl financing at its worst.”
But here’s what can happen instead — what, in fact, did happen in the Kurigram district of northwest Bangladesh in July. With colossal rains predicted, the United Nations World Food Program and the Bangladesh government identified about 5,000 particularly vulnerable families. Three days before the flood hit, they used mobile phone banking to send each family the equivalent of $53. With that money, the families secured their houses and belongings — for example, buying materials to lift their furniture off the ground. And they could pay the costs of taking their livestock and fleeing.
Instead of getting relief after they were wiped out by the flood, the residents were able to avoid much of the loss — for $10 per person.
The accomplishment in Bangladesh is one of a handful of examples worldwide of anticipating disaster.
But it doesn’t have to be the rare exception. If disasters take us by surprise, it’s because we weren’t looking. With satellite data and mathematical modeling, we can now know about a flood or drought days or even weeks in advance. “We’ve improved so much in getting the precise likelihood of this particular area being flooded, and the number of people affected,” Dr. Dercon said of the Bangladesh case. “We probably couldn’t have done this 10 years ago.”
We can’t predict the first case of a new outbreak of Ebola, but we can know where that deadly disease recurs and use that first case to predict later ones. Using satellite data, scientists can anticipate cholera outbreaks days, even weeks, in advance. When violent conflict breaks out or terrible drought sets in, we can plot the mass movement of refugees.
An early response can prevent suffering. With famine expected in Somalia in 2017, for example, U.N. and other aid agencies sent 600,000 families vouchers by text message redeemable in local markets. (All hail mobile phone banking!) The vouchers fed families and the local economy, and famine was averted.
Anticipating disasters can also help when they continue. In Kenya, rural herders can buy subsidized insurance that pays them automatically by mobile phone when satellites determine that the available forage in their area is too scarce to support livestock. A payout in time to buy food for a cow is vastly preferable to a payout after the cow dies. It’s health insurance, not life insurance.
We can even prepare for unexpected disasters. Mexico can’t predict a specific earthquake. But it knows that the country is an enormous earthquake zone. So in the late 1990s, the government established the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden. It allows Mexico to make action plans and money available in advance of any quake, as well as to start relief and reconstruction immediately when one occurs. In 2006, Mexico issued the world’s first government catastrophe bond, a form of insurance that pays out when an earthquake strikes.
Caribbean countries can buy policies from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility to insure against cyclones, earthquakes and very heavy rains. In Africa, the African Risk Capacity pays countries when rain is scarce.
Mark Lowcock, under-secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs — the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator — is trying to push the relief system toward anticipating disasters. He said that one sign of progress is the growth of the U.N.’s Central Emergency Response Fund, which he administers. Its funding has been roughly steady since 2006 at about $500 million a year, but in 2019 donors contributed $828 million.
Other groups are also trying anticipatory action. Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in several countries have piloted forecast-based financing, providing aid in advance of floods, mostly, but also heat and cold waves.
But getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world’s response to the likelihood of one. “We’ve got quite a lot of very persuasive examples,” Mr. Lowcock said. “It’s nice to have 25,000 people in Bangladesh, but most situations have caseloads in the millions. There is much more scope to do this than is happening at the moment.”
In general, we don’t plan enough for disasters largely because we’ve assumed our political processes demand those visible victims. Political systems are notoriously bad at long-term thinking. It’s hard to raise money in the abstract. Politicians know you don’t get credit for prevention.
“We’ve learned in other areas of development to be more sophisticated in our use of financial instruments,” Dr. Dercon said. “Somehow in the humanitarian space we just never embraced this. The humanitarian sector has lots of really good people, but it’s built around the emotion of helping people in need.”
How we react to disasters matters more than ever. This year, 168 million people will need disaster assistance, a record high. Mr. Lowcock said that in two years, that could rise to 200 million people. He said the main reasons for the increase are droughts and floods related to climate change, large outbreaks of infectious disease (often related to climate as well) and protracted violent conflicts — which are increasingly killing children, he said.
New research shows that how we respond — or not — to a disaster can follow people for the rest of their lives. A 2017 World Bank report found that prosperous countries are the ones lucky enough to avoid crises that set them back. Just as a fall can permanently damage the health of an older person, conflict, drought or epidemic can permanently make a country poorer.
Drought, particularly, is crippling, because it creates lasting malnutrition, leading to permanent cognitive and physical damage. Researchers found that without relief, a drought causes a 4 percent drop in the income of affected people — for the long term. And a speedy response is crucial. “A response time that is one month quicker has a benefit of 0.8 percent of income per capita in the long run,” the study says.
There is wide agreement on the value of having money set aside, a plan for what to do and agreement on what triggers action. But what’s needed to get that done isn’t always present. Mr. Lowcock gave the example of drought in Somalia: It’s not enough to predict hunger and famine. “We need to know at the village level who are the most vulnerable,” he said. “We’re trying to build models to answer that question for us.”
U.N. agencies are getting creative with the challenge of knowing when to help. Rebeca Moreno Jiménez, the U.N. refugee agency’s first data scientist, recently traveled to Ethiopia to interview Somali refugees, hoping to identify something measurable that can signal relief is needed. What she found was the price of goats. Refugees told her that before people flee, they sell their goats, which are too fragile to make the trip. So the crash in goat prices that would accompany a mass sell-off means people are getting ready to move. We know they will end up in Ethiopia several days later.
This work is still experimental. “We are bothering our colleagues in the Food and Agriculture Organization,” she said. “Every month, we’re asking for goat prices in Somalia.” Her program has now established an interagency dashboard where everyone can track the prices F.A.O. posts.
“Cynical people think politicians are prompted to action only when they see the starving kid in the street,” Mr. Lowcock said. “But when I talk to politicians and confront them with the fact that we can anticipate problems better than that, they get it. That’s why my fund is bigger this year than last and we are able to fund more experiments. No one wants to see a starving kid on the street and think, ‘If we’d done something earlier, we might have been able to stop that.’”
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
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