World leaders meet on disaster management in Japan

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SENDAI, Japan — Politicians and aid officials will gather in Japan’s quake- and tsunami-hit northeast Tuesday to discuss what lessons can be learned from disasters.

Pre-emptive measures to reduce damage — and save lives — when nature strikes will be top of the agenda at this two-day conference, part of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Organisers picked Sendai as the capital of a region that lost nearly 19,000 people when the massive waves of March 2011 rolled ashore, crushing whole communities.

Kazushige Taniguchi, the World Bank’s special representative to Japan said delegates would “share and learn from Japan’s experience in last year’s quake and tsunami disaster”.

“Lots of developing countries are today rapidly putting up infrastructure without paying enough attention to disaster prevention.

“We aim to make it standard to incorporate disaster prevention into the planning of development aid,” he told reporters ahead of the meeting.

On Wednesday, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim will visit disaster-hit areas before wrapping up the two-day conference.

The Sendai talks are expected to feed into the communique to be issued on Saturday at the meeting of the Development Committee, the highest Fund and Bank joint decision-making body, Taniguchi said.

Last week, Japan and the World Bank released a joint study aimed at sharing experience from last year, when a 9.0-magnitude quake and resulting tsunami crushed the coast and triggered the worst nuclear crisis in a generation.

The study, comprising 32 “knowledge notes” on disaster risk management and post-disaster reconstruction, will be used as a basis of discussions in Sendai.

“We hope aid practitioners will find the knowledge notes useful, as they include some novel findings such as importance of education that would percolate into people’s behaviour,” said Taniguchi.

They also talk about the importance of paying attention to supply chains, a key lesson from Japan’s disaster where global industries like automotive were crippled when a key parts production line was knocked out.

Education, the distribution of hazard maps and the issuance of early warnings as well as the importance of reinforcing key buildings also feature.

The report notes the usefulness of social media for search, rescue and fundraising, and the importance of constructing temporary housing and maintaining existing sources of income in the recovery phase.

Many of these notes are still challenges for Japan, where 329,000 people are still living in temporary homes, nearly 19 months on.

The government plans to build new houses in upland areas and to offer cash handouts to partially finance housing loans.

The disaster left 18,684 people dead or missing and sparked reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the coast, figures from the National Police Agency showed.

Of those, 2,814 people remain unaccounted for.

The knowledge notes can be downloaded from the world bank website:https://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/megadisasters#