Opinion: Confronting the ugly face of disasters

In his Manila Standard Today opinion piece Gery Geronimo gives his account of the Roundtable on Business Continuity Planning Conference in Makati, which was held in the same time as the 45th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank.

He quotes Margareta Wahlström, United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, who warned that business continuity planning should "should be focused on the vulnerabilities of the business itself as well as inclusive of the consequences of the disaster on those with whom the business deals in one way or another."

The article sites costs of recent disasters and points out that poor people are particularly hardly hit by disasters. Finally, Mr Geronimo writes: "Planning to prevent or minimize the impact of disasters makes economic sense. It is established that for every $1 invested in resilience or prevention of damage, $4 to $7 are served. Earnings of companies that have adopted the best practices of disaster risk reduction were 40 percent less volatile than those who didn’t. "