OneWorld.net (U.S.)

About 35 million people are living through the “worst flood in living memory” as the UN has described the unprecedented disaster in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

With limited assistance from governments and humanitarian agencies overstretched, help is a distant reality for many. The response from the international community has been lukewarm. Time is running out - money is running out.

Thanks to local communities, the army and police, rescue efforts have been improving. But assistance is not in tune with the reality on the ground.

For example, on Tuesday, my colleagues from ActionAid reached flood-hit Bagla, a small village in the Indian province of Bihar. They moved around the marooned land, wading through waist-deep water, sometimes summoning locally-made small boats. They were the first to arrive with any relief supplies - and that was nearly two weeks after the floods began. It is time for the world to pay attention.

Distribution of aid in Bihar has been hampered by roads washed away by flooding. Those who have been getting aid have been close to main roads that are still intact. People living in remote villages have just been left out.

To tackle the problem, the government brought in helicopters. But they too missed the point. The air-drops were limited to certain areas and the bags and water containers burst on impact. Fights over food led to stampedes and one young man died in a police shoot out.

“This could have been avoided if local people were involved in relief efforts,” said a villager.

Deploying helicopters may have been well motivated but good intentions don’t ensure sustainable humanitarian assistance which is either appropriate or timely.

What does the “worst flood in living memory” mean? For poor people, especially women and children, it means being stranded in floods, homeless and hungry; cut off from the world for a fortnight, braving snakes and insects, under threat of waterborne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, diarrhoea and Hepatitis A. There is no school, no play, nothing to smile about - it is a long list of woes.

Worse, we are in the middle of the flood season. Some fear the worst has yet to happen. The history of floods shows that responses are often knee-jerk. Attention remains for a couple of weeks or as long as there is media interest but people are left to fend for themselves afterwards.

This time people have died, livelihoods have been destroyed and dreams shattered - it has turned back the development clock several years. Recovery is going to be a life-long marathon, not a 100-metre sprint.

It is important to look at what amplified the flood and miseries this time: Here is a list.

We know from experience that earthquakes alone don’t kill people, but bad buildings do. When it comes to floods, there are several factors.

Poverty is a key factor. Analysis of disaster casualties worldwide shows that an ‘average disaster’ kills 555 people in a poor country, but just 18 in a rich one. So, it is a question of where the disaster strikes and how rich you are.

On Tuesday, the UN’s World Metereological Organization said that the world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early July: floods in South Asia, heavy rain in northern Europe, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heat waves in South Eastern Europe and Russia and unusual snow falls in South America. Experts have been warning that climate change is already wreaking havoc and it is one of the issues amplifying disasters.

While scientists continue their debate about the rise in mean temperatures and sea levels, I can see what’s happening to poor people. In the past few years I’ve been working in flood and cyclone-hit areas like Vietnam, Haiti, New Orleans and the Maldives and seen their incidence increasing.

You can blame it on climate change or George Bush (for not signing the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions that warm up the globe) but the poor are suffering more and more. And the intensity and frequency of their suffering is increasing. If the science is too complicated, put people at the centre stage of the climate debate. It is high time scientists factored people into their equations.

Structures created to protect people from flooding like embankments and dams are exacerbating the problem. More than 100 breaches have been reported in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in flood-hit northern India. In south India, release of reservoir water without warning, killed several people a couple of years ago.

Floods are a recurring annual phenomenon so how come we are not more prepared? Disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction are not high on governments’ agendas. Governments have committed to address this issue through the UN Hyogo Framework for Action. However, files have yet to move and action yet to start.

Stopping a disaster from becoming a crisis is not rocket science. To make this happen, here is a wish list:

1) We need visionary politicians who can boldly say no to destructive, disaster-amplifying development projects and processes. 2) We need planners who can think long term – no disaster response should be treated as a hundred metre sprint 3) Put people, especially the poor, marginal communities, women, the elderly and children at the centre of the response. 4) Amplify people’s voices - learn from their experiences. 5) Address the issue of climate change - analyse and address the vulnerabilities of communities exposed to its dangers like coastal fishing communities and island dwellers. 6) Invest in disaster risk reduction and preparedness. It is a hundred times more cost effective than knee-jerk responses. 7) Catch them young – start disaster preparedness lessons and a culture of safety right from school. (Politician must address the issues of future voters as well) 8) Poverty is the engine that fuels miseries during disasters - invest in initiatives that strike at the roots of poverty. 9) Be transparent, accountable and stick to standards while responding to disasters. 10) Humanitarian response is not an act of charity, but a matter of right.

There is one wish that I share with every humanitarian worker who spends a good part of his or her life in emergency situations or relief camps across the world – that lives lost in a disaster should not go waste. It is the collective responsibility of all of us to ensure that we learn from the past.

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Dr Unnikrishnan PV is a medical doctor who works in humanitarian situations. He is ActionAid’s Emergencies and Human Security Advisor for Asia currently co-ordinating humanitarian interventions in Sri Lanka.