Viet Nam and the international community have made efforts in natural disaster mitigation and participating in disaster mitigation organisations in the region, a Government official told APEC chief executive officers in Ha Noi yesterday.
With abundant disasters all over the world, and especially in the Asia-Pacific region in the past decade, the third Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Emergency Management CEO’s forum opened yesterday to discuss and propose investment policies for natural disaster mitigation in the region.
"Viet Nam is not an exception [to the impacts of climate change]," said Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Bui Ba Bong at the two-day forum, which drew 47 member CEOs and local officials from relevant ministries and organisations.
Viet Nam, located in a tropical monsoon area, is one of the five storm hubs in the Asia-Pacific region.
With complicated topographical features, Viet Nam frequently faces various types of natural disasters. In the past five years, natural disasters caused more than 2,000 deaths and material damage estimated to be around US$3 billion, or 1.5 per cent of the country’s GDP, a significant loss for a developing country like Viet Nam.
"Natural disasters cannot be stopped, but we can mitigate their damage," said Bong, who revealed that the host Government had approved the national strategy for natural disaster prevention, response and mitigation to 2020.
Asia has been the world’s most disaster-prone region, and had suffered through roughly half of the world’s major disasters over the past five decades. The Asia-Pacific region comprises 52 per cent of the earth’s surface area and 59 per cent of the world’s population, and has experienced over 70 per cent of the world’s natural disasters, all of which destabilise economies and social and institutional systems. Natural disasters last year in Asia affected 177 million people and cost $118 billion.
With the warning from scientists that the intensity and frequency of disasters in the Asia-Pacific region could increase in the decades ahead, APEC members have seen the importance of better co-ordination in implementing strategies for disaster risk reduction and emergency preparedness and response in the region for the 2009-15 period, which was adopted by APEC leaders and ministers last year.
Asia-Pacific is seen as a disaster-prone region, with 40 per cent of the world’s disasters but 92 per cent of their victims, according to the CRED annual disaster statistical review for 2000-06. One of the main reasons was that most of the regional countries and territories were developing economies located in seasonal monsoon areas. Urban dwellers in these areas had doubled since 1960, and the poor were hardest hit.
Lessons learned
The forum, which was a follow-up to Australia’s Cairns and Peru’s Lima over the last two years, also aimed at improving co-operation and co-ordination among APEC members and between APEC and international organisations in helping the region’s community better prepare for emergencies and natural disasters.
One of the main sessions of the two-day meeting was reviewing and exchanging practices and lessons learned from major catastrophes in the region in the past few years, which included the Australian bush fire, the Sichuan earthquake, Taipei’s typhoon Morakot, Indonesia’s earthquake and tsunami and Myanmar’s cyclone Nargis.
The forum was also an overview of APEC’s co-operation on disaster and emergency preparedness – achievements and challenges with a focus on reviewing the implementation of the "Strategy for disaster risk reduction and emergency preparedness and response in the Asia-Pacific Region: 2009-15".