WUNRN
INDONESIA - FLOODS PARALYZE - RAINS
CONTINUE - WOMEN & GIRLS
January
18, 2013 - At their peak, almost 250,000 people were affected by flooding in
Jakarta, Indonesia, which covered about 30 percent of the city. The floods have
been the most widespread to hit the city since 2007, when almost 80 died and
more than half of the city as affected. - AP
AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim
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January 13,
2013 - JAKARTA (REUTERS) - Heavy monsoon rains triggered severe flooding in
large swathes of the Indonesian capital on Thursday, with many government
offices and businesses forced to closed because staff could not get to work.
Weather
officials warned the rains could get worse over the next few days and media
reports said that thousands of people in Jakarta and its satellite cities had
been forced to leave their homes because of the torrential downpours this week.......
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Women,
Girls,& Disasters
By Margareta Wahlström, the United Nations
Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head
of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).
10 October 2012 - GENEVA – Every year, more than
200 million people are affected by natural disasters. Many will bear the brunt
of recurring floods, storms, or droughts, and the majority of them will be women
and girls. Most of those affected by recurring disasters survive. In fact, in
all but the poorest and most poorly run countries, deaths resulting from
weather-related disasters are on the decline.
What is not
on the decline, though, is our exposure to risk and the high price that we pay
in terms of lost jobs, destroyed or damaged homes, and disruption to education,
health services, and transport infrastructure.
Just as the
most expensive hospital is the one that collapses during an earthquake, so the most
expensive disaster-management plan is the one that fails to tackle the root
causes of recurring disasters. A combination of inept urban planning and
ignorance of the true economic cost of such events can all too easily allow
valuable community assets to be swept away.
There are
two approaches to building resilience to disasters. The most visible is the
structural approach, which invests money wisely in flood protection, drainage,
preservation of wetlands and forests, and remedial action – based on sound risk
assessment – to protect valuable infrastructure.
The other,
non-structural approach focuses on early warning systems, public policy,
legislation, insurance, knowledge, education, training, and community
participation. It should also focus on issues that make particular groups of
people vulnerable because of their gender, age, religion, or poverty.
Ignoring the
female voice in a disaster context is foolish in the extreme. We know that some
of the most powerful recovery programs in the wake of disasters are driven by
women who have survived the worst.
Countries
that do not actively promote the full participation of women in education,
politics, and the workforce will struggle more than most when it comes to
reducing risk and adapting to climate change. Gender equality is thus an
essential element of our work in building resilience to disasters and reducing
the risk to lives, jobs, and property. It is also, literally, a matter of life
and death if women and girls are not empowered to participate fully in disaster
management and planning.
This year,
on the International Day for Disaster Reduction, we want to shine a light on
women and girls, and to recognize what they are already doing to build their
communities’ resilience in places where gender is not a barrier to their full
participation in public life. We need to appreciate what women and girls are
achieving by putting their experience and knowledge to good use in designing
disaster plans and identifying areas for improvement in urban planning and
early warning systems.
More than
100 million women and girls are affected by disasters each year. They all have
a right to be equipped for survival, and they all have a right to contribute to
keeping their communities safe from harm.
We need more
women volunteering at the community level, and we need more women in senior
positions as disaster managers. A world in which exposure to disaster is
growing exponentially – and causing ever-higher economic losses – needs all the
female help that it can get.