The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed more than 200,000 people and led to billions in aid distribution throughout the region.
Edd Wright, the Southeast Asia representative for the Oklahoma City-based international development organization World Neighbors, works on what he calls disaster risk reduction in Indonesia. His group starts by working with governments to identify which villages are most at-risk from disaster, which is followed by a need-based assessment (the communities don’t have to participate). From there, they start to categorize what types of disasters the community has faced.
“For example, in the last 10 years, they’ve had three droughts. They’ve had five earthquakes,” Wright told KGOU’s World Views. “Then you categorize the damage caused. And then you’d be able to calculate their vulnerability and their capacity to deal with that risk.”
At that point, World Neighbors comes up with an action plan that will guide their work for the next 2-3 years.
“We would introduce crops which are more drought-resistant, or more flood-resistant. Then we would make a map of the community and work with the community on evacuation routes,” Wright said. Come up with areas which are topographically higher, so they’re safe places to stay. We put them in contact with the government search and rescue team. And then we run simulation disasters.”
But in the developing world, conflict and war often get in the way of building capacity and resiliency especially when natural resources are involved. Before joining World Neighbors, Wright worked extensively in South Sudan, which has a large pastoral culture. Since many residents don’t have a permanent homestead, nomadic residents go to where there’s arable land and potable water. That means different tribes and different ethnicities will inevitably come into contact with one another.
“One of the things we did, we were building reservoirs. We called them hafirs. This is a huge hole in the ground for rainwater harvesting,” Wright said. “So when the rains come the water would be stored there for a few months, so then it would stop communities from entering into each other’s land.”
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Edd Wright, welcome to World Views.
EDD WRIGHT: Thank you for having me.
GRILLOT: Well, Edd, you're originally from Wales. You hold degrees in human rights law. But you currently live and work in Indonesia. Most people don't realize how large Indonesia actually is. It's a very populous country. A Muslim country. Obviously composed of numerous islands. You mentioned the Boxing Day, the day after Christmas tsunami following the earthquake back in 2004 where it was just devastating, of course, to many in the region. But that's one of the things that you work on, and I think one of the things that a country like Indonesia really struggles with, and that is how to manage natural disasters, and how to reduce the risk of being victimized by natural disasters. So what is some of the work that you do in Indonesia to address that?
WRIGHT: So this really is the main focus of our work at the moment. So it's called disaster risk reduction. And we work mainly at the village level. So we first worked with the government to identify which villages are most at risk from disasters. Then we do a broad, participatory needs-based assessment. And from that assessment, then you categorize each of the different types of disasters the community has faced. For example, in the last 10 years, they've had three droughts. They've had five earthquakes. And then you categorize the damage caused. And then you'd be able to calculate their vulnerability and their capacity to deal with that risk. So then once we have this assessment, everything's very participatory. We come up with an action plan about how we can reduce the vulnerability and increase their capacity. And so that action plan, that's the document which guides our work for the next two-three years. At the community level, they have a management group who's responsible to the community for implementing that action plan. And then as World Neighbors, we're there to build this group's capacity.
GRILLOT: So what are some of the specific things, though, that you do to build capacity? To be able to, let's say, survive floods and protect their agriculture. It's an agricultural area. So what are some of the things that you suggest?
WRIGHT: We would introduce crops which are more drought-resistant, or more flood-resistant. Then we would make a map of the community and work with the community on evacuation routes. Come up with areas which are topographically higher, so they're the safe places to stay. We put them in contact with the government search and rescue team. And then we run simulation disasters. So the whole community would come together for the day. We work together with the Red Cross and then the government's disaster management unit, and we'd run through a simulation. So in this community management group, as I said earlier, people have different roles. So a group of people would be involved, like the first response. Another group would be involved in contacting the hospitals, making sure there's paramedics on hand. Another group would receive training in like trauma counseling. So that's the type of activities we do.
GRILLOT: So speaking of crops and the kind of agriculture products that Indonesia produces. We're very familiar, I think, with coffee as being one of their primary products. It's not the only one. What else are they producing there that they do need to manage, in terms of the weather. We don't realize how much the weather really has an impact on our agricultural areas such as in Indonesia, which is an equatorial region. And therefore has some fluctuating weather.
WRIGHT: Yeah, the main crops are paddies. So rice and corn. The areas where we work is mostly corn, because we work mostly with rural upland communities. So it's quite difficult, quite risky to grow rice, because you need a lot of water. But where we work, we try to introduce local crops. And we call them local crops rather than a monocrop like corn or rice. Local crops are more like cassava or sweet potatoes. And then papaya, bananas, and local corn, rather than the hybrid corn that they're growing. Because these crops are more resistant to climate change. So they can deal with fluctuating weather. Because the main impact from climate change in these communities is erratic rainfall. Up until 10-15 years ago, the rains would come when they always had. But now, recently, the wet season should start November-December. And now it starts in January-February and is finishing March or April. It used to finish in January. So it's a lot shorter, but it's a lot more intense. So you need crops which are able to deal most of the year with very little rainfall, but still can be harvested when there's a downpour.
GRILLOT: So obviously guiding them, working with them to develop sustainable farming practices that will work with, as you mentioned, climate change. So clearly the climate is changing for Indonesia. You just mentioned the rainy season changing, being shorter, starting later. So what are some of the things, in addition to just helping them produce the right crops for climate change, and that changes a lot of the market and it changes their way of life. But what are some of the other things that they can do, or that you're helping them to do to manage the change in their climate?
WRIGHT: Most of the places where we work, it's really subsistence farming. So they're not really connected to the markets yet. But a lot of them are still, we try to use organic fertilizer whenever we can. And this is fertilizer that the farmers can produce themselves. So that really keeps the nutrients in the soil, because if you use chemical fertilizer, it's good for growing a crop fast. But after 2-3 years the soil is really degraded. So rather than slash-and-burn agriculture, which maybe was in the news recently because of the huge smog problems across Southeast Asia, we tried to introducing terracing and contour farming, and these soil and water conservation techniques so the farmer doesn't have to keep moving around looking for new soil, because the soil's already degraded. He's able to use the same piece of land for many, many years. So we do soil/water conservation, and terracing, contour farming. And also agroforestry. Agroforestry is intercropping crops together with trees. Trees are excellent nutrient providers. And so we'd have like maybe a row of coffee and then like a row of trees. And this really keeps the soil fertile. It makes the crops grow better, and also after 10-15 years, the community is able to cut the trees and sell them as wood. So it's a livelihood project as well.
GRILLOT: So your discussion about having to perhaps move around a little bit doing some subsistence farming, but moving around to find the right soil makes me think of Sudan, your work in Sudan would be relevant here. Can you just tell us a little bit about the...having worked in development in both areas, I would presume in some of the same issue areas, on some of the same issue areas, that you can make some comparison to the two countries? Any similar issues that they're dealing with? I mean we talk often about climate change being a big problem in Sudan as well, desertification in that case. Where they're losing arable land and farming land, grazing land. So that this has led to a significant amount of war and conflict in Sudan, like perhaps other issues have led to civil war in Indonesia. Were there any lessons you've learned from one place to the other that are generalizable, perhaps?
WRIGHT: In South Sudan, I was a water and sanitation manager, so I was managing a program where water sanitation was like a peacebuilding tool. We would build like a borehole...between two communities there's a little bit of a conflict over water scarcity. So we would meet with the communities, decide a strategic place for the borehole to go, and then we would drill it and provide a lot of capacity building around conflict resolution, because that was my background. So it was a really lot more response-based, whereas in Indonesia we're building more of a resilience. So we've moved further along, say, the development spectrum. In South Sudan, it was totally devastated. I was there just before independence, so it's been devastated by this two decade-long civil war. So we were really providing a humanitarian response. Whereas in Indonesia the communities where we were working, the poverty levels are very, very high. But it's a development project. It's not a response. So we're building the resilience and providing material aid. Because World Neighbors, our focus is that we don't come along to hand out materials or equipment, we really build the capacity which is already there. So in South Sudan we were really a service provider, because the government was basically non-existent at the time.
GRILLOT: It is interesting, though, to think about, as you mentioned, your organization building resilience and building capacity. Such an important aspect of development. But conflict and war over resources getting in the way of the ability to build capacity and build resiliency. There's so much to overcome, like you said, you're responding to these crises. So some of the work that you did in terms of...you mentioned that in Sudan you were working in a post-conflict zone where there was conflict over things like scarcity to water. So what are some of the activities that you did? What did you do? I can't even imagine going into an environment like that and saying, 'OK, we're going to work out your access to water here in order to respond to your crisis and conflict.'
WRIGHT: Yeah, for example, in South Sudan you have a lot of pastoralists. So they don't have sedentary homesteads. So they spend a lot of the year moving. Often they come into conflict with other people, because everybody is walking. You don't move into un-arable areas. Everybody wants to go where the land is very underdeveloped. People normally congregate around water holes, or where the soil is good. So often different tribes will come into conflict with each other, different ethnicities. So one of the things we did, we were building reservoirs. We called them hafirs, I think. This is a huge hole in the ground for rainwater harvesting. So when the rains come the water would be stored there for a few months, so then it would stop communities from entering into each other's land. So that was one of the conflict resolution ideas that we had. Also, water is probably the most basic thing, and conflicts would appear in a village where a woman, mostly a woman or a young child, is having to queue for 10 hours a day. And then some big man will come along and go right to the front of the queue and take his water. So if we're able to site a borehole in a more strategic place, and then the waiting time is lessened, it's a more open area, so everyone can see who's queuing. It's a more transparent process to get the water. And again, that's just a small level of how conflict inside a village could be solved.
GRILLOT: Well, such challenging work that you're doing, Edd. Really appreciate you being here to discuss it and really appreciate the work that you're doing, because it's very difficult, I'm sure, to work in countries such as this and help them manage, teach them to manage, their development problems. So thank you very much for being here.
WRIGHT: Thank you very much for having me.
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