Risk

There has to be a science to this: this business of mitigating the potential devastation of natural calamities.

This science has to be at the core of our governance. We can no longer afford to have leaders who merely give speeches. We need leaders who do science.

We’ve been told this over and over again: we are a vulnerable archipelago.

We sit astride the Pacific ring of fire — with active volcanoes and shifting continental plates that could cause massive earthquakes. Twenty typhoons visit us every year — the last few ones, because of global warming, dumping more rainwater than ever. Like old plaster, our islands are crisscrossed with fault lines.

Being an archipelago, we are dependent on sea craft. At any one time, we have thousands of boats out at sea, vulnerable to sudden changes in the weather. We have communities exposed to storm surges and tsunamis. 

We are an overpopulated archipelago. Our population growth long exceeded the theoretical carrying capacity of our fragile island topology. This forced our people to live in dangerous areas: on steep slopes, river banks and flood plains.

Despite all these, we have allowed our society to develop in the most haphazard fashion, given to fatalism rather than science. The weak state we allowed to persist could not manage our settlements well enough to mitigate the potential adverse effects of calamities.

Our maritime safety standards have always been poor, justified on the grounds we could not afford anything better. I once sat on the board of the National Development Corporation and promptly ran into an argument when I insisted on applying international classing of inter-island vessels we might procure. Others insisted that the implied cost could not be absorbed by our consumers. I yielded my seat on that board.

The primal role of government is to protect its citizens, not to yield to every populist whim that might arise from the community.

Governments were organized, in the first place, to protect its people from marauders or from famine. They built walls around their cities and aquaducts to ensure the availability of fresh water. They built dikes to protect against floods and communal silos to store grain.

There is this theory of the “hydraulic society” advanced to explain the rise of a despotic imperial state in what is now China. Such a state, according to this theory, was necessary to supervise the great task of managing the rampaging waters of large and temperamental rivers. The waters required great dikes to prevent inundation and control their flow to support irrigation.

Minor fiefdoms could not manage those tasks. Nor could those tasks be accomplished on the basis of the consensus of the shortsighted.

The state structure that evolved out of the need to master the Yangtze soon enough found the capacity to build the Great Wall to keep out marauding Mongols. Today, that despotic state has made possible the engineering wonder of the Three Gorges dam that, when finally completed, will generate the equivalent electricity of a hundred nuclear power plants.

For centuries, mankind pondered uncertainty. We have developed “the law of large numbers” to deal with probabilities and enable us to better anticipate outcomes. Nothing is absolutely predictable; but understanding probabilities enable us to better cope with outcomes.

Today, the norm for properly managing large corporations — especially in banking and finance — is risk management. This is an emerging science, hugely dependent on statistics and the calculus. The capacity to manage risk sets apart good corporate governance from inferior ones.

In the development community, the equivalent is disaster risk management. This sets apart good public governance from inferior ones.

The disastrous results of the last two storms that hit us underscore the weakness in our capacity for disaster risk management. True, the unexpected deluge swamped our rescue and relief capacities thoroughly. That is just the icing on the cake.

Adequate disaster management was sorely lacking when communities were allowed to settle in flood-prone areas, when spillways were not built and when rivers were not dredged. It was sorely lacking because different agencies and diverse local government units were left to do their thing, employing different standards for disaster mitigation or none at all.

Adequate disaster management was sorely lacking because it was never the organizing principle for the entire apparatus of government and governance. If there was anything close to an organizing principle of this entire apparatus, it was some hazy notion of “development.”

Even when we began talking in terms of “sustainable development”, this remained largely understood as economic expansion based on renewable means: secure energy sources, reliable markets and, generally speaking, ecologically sound industrial practices. The aspect of disaster risk management is embedded in this but not salient.

In the light of what happened, we need to radically reorganize the way this society is governed. We cannot, for instance, continue on with the present situation where 40 agencies partake of policy-making affecting the water sector. No wonder there is so much policy incoherence.

Henceforth, given our peculiar predicament, disaster risk management ought to be the main organizing principle for our governance. Public safety is, after all, the historical necessity for the state.