chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)As large cities have grown without the necessary infrastructure, so the gap betweenwhat is needed and what is affordable can widen to an almost impossible degree (seeChapter 2). More than 50 per cent of the population of many large cities in Africa andAsia live in settlements without basic infrastructure. The haphazard spatial expansionof a city and the concentration of many low-income settlements on flood plains, steepslopes or other sites at risk add to the costs. The capacity of municipal governments inmost cities in low-income nations to invest in necessary infrastructure remains limited,however, even if they have been able to modernize tax collection systems or have bettercost-recovery for services such as water supplies. And this is not helped by the reluctanceof most bilateral aid agencies to support urban development.Infrastructure to prevent disaster risks is often costly to both build and maintain. Thedevastating floods that affected Santa Fe, Argentina, in 2003 and 2007 were in partdue to incomplete or unmaintained infrastructure. The city has increasingly expandedon to the Río Salado flood plain. To protect itself from floods, it had to create embankmentsand dykes, but the infrastructure to protect certain city areas was supposed to bein place shortly after 1998 but was never completed due to lack of resources. In addition,the pumps and drainage systems installed to evacuate water in protected areas didnot work because of vandalism and lack of maintenance.Box 7.3 Good governance and disaster risk reduction in AcehAccording to the Centre for Research on theEpidemiology of Disasters, more than 19 millionof Indonesia’s 210 million people havebeen affected by 309 disasters in the last twodecades. Aceh, the westernmost province ofIndonesia, is inhabited by some 4 million people.On 26 December 2004, Aceh was struckby an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richterscale and the subsequent tsunami left 130,000people dead, 37,000 missing and an additional500,000 people displaced. Damageand losses were estimated at US$ 4.8 billion.Aceh was also suffering from a 30-year conflictthat had claimed the lives of 15,000 peopleby the time a peace agreement was signed inAugust 2005.The international and national shift inparadigm from focusing on disaster responseto enhancing disaster risk reduction underpinsthe reform process in Indonesia. Collaborationbetween the government, civil society organizationsand international agencies led to adisaster management law, which was enactedin 2007. The law authorizes the creationof a National Disaster Management Agency(BNPB), which reports directly to the presidentof Indonesia and has a mandate to coordinateall contingency, preparedness, mitigation,prevention, disaster management trainingand disaster risk reduction activities (i.e., riskassessment and mapping). The law also addressesand regulates the development andapplication of disaster management and disasterrisk reduction plans at national and locallevels. Following passage of the law, the presidentissued Presidential Regulation 8/2008,which formally established the BNPB. Soonafterwards, the minister of home affairs issuedDecree No. 46/2008 mandating the establishmentof local disaster management agencies in148