The scale of loss from the December 26 tsunami is by now sadly familiar to most people: More than 200,000 people perished, and over 1.5 million were left homeless. Economic losses have been estimated at more than US$6 billion, and the destruction of infrastructure, fishing fleets, and industry means that economic recovery will take years. In short, the tsunami ranks as one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

Tragically, the enormous loss of life and property may have been at least partly avoidable. If the tsunami had taken place on the coast of Japan instead of in the Indian Ocean, it would have swept ashore to a population and a physical environment well prepared for the onslaught of water. The country’s Tsunami Warning System aims to give citizens at least 10 minutes to evacuate the area in the path of a tsunami, and an extensive array of tsunami walls, shelters, and floodgates helps protect the shoreline. But none of these were present around the Indian Ocean.

The tsunami illustrates the pattern that natural disasters increasingly display: poor countries and people bear the brunt of the devastation. Natural disasters occur when a natural hazard (such as an earthquake, cyclone, or drought) intersects with human vulnerability (such as poor building standards, inappropriate land use, or lack of knowledge about and preparation for the hazard). And the poor remain highly vulnerable.

Over the past 80 years, whereas the number of recorded natural disasters has increased, the number of fatalities has decreased, so the world has made some progress on reducing the impact of disasters. Still, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), from 1980 to 2000 about 1.5 million people died in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tropical storms, droughts, and other natural disasters. Death rates are far higher in poor countries than in rich ones. Although only 11 percent of the people exposed to natural hazards live in poor countries, these people account for more than 53 percent of deaths recorded from natural disasters. The differences in impact suggest that there is great potential to reduce the devastation caused by natural disasters in developing countries--that, in fact, the key ingredient in these tragedies is human inaction.

"There is nothing natural about these disasters," says Andrew Maskrey, chief of the UNDP’s Disaster Reduction Unit. "The impact of disasters can be sharply reduced if governments make an effort to reduce risk before a disaster happens, rather than rush to respond after the damage has been done."

There is increasing recognition that disaster preparedness at the international, national, and local levels is key to reducing the destructiveness of natural disasters. In the wake of the tsunami disaster, plans are afoot to create an international tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean, using buoys, seismic stations, and satellites. Such a system has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, but it will be of little use if local people, many of whom have no access to modern communications, do not get the warning or do not know what to do when they do get it.To be effective, the early warning system will need to be accompanied by education and public awareness campaigns as well as communications infrastructure. "You need to know who has authority to make decisions, you need emergency radio procedures, and you need evacuation routes," says William Orme, a spokesperson for UNDP.

Bangladesh, which has been called the most disaster-prone country in the world, has shown that even a poor country can effectively prepare for disaster. Bangladesh is subject to cyclones, flooding, storm surges, droughts, tornadoes, and earthquakes. In the wake of a devastating cyclone in 1970 that killed some 500,000 people in Bangladesh, that country began to focus on preparedness. Since then it has built cyclone shelters along its coastline and developed rapid evacuation procedures that have saved millions of lives, according to World Disasters Report 2002. A cyclone in 1991 killed about 139,000 people, but thanks to vigorous preparedness efforts, another large cyclone in 1994 claimed only 165 lives.

Bangladesh is also subject to regular annual flooding of its rivers, but every 10 years or so, the flooding reaches a disastrous scale, according to Paul Dorosh, formerly an IFPRI researcher and coeditor (with Carlo del Ninno and Quazi Shahabuddin) of a book entitled The 1998 Floods and Beyond: Towards Comprehensive Food Security in Bangladesh. Severe floods in 1974 were followed by food shortages, widespread hunger, and even famine. Then in 1998, floodwaters rose to cover two-thirds of the country. Because the floods came on slowly, over the course of weeks, there was little loss of life, but the water destroyed more than 2 million tons of rice crops. Fortunately, the country was ready with a new strategy for avoiding a food crisis. The private sector stepped in with enormous imports of rice from India to help keep food supplies in the markets at stable prices, and the government directed well-targeted food transfer programs to the neediest people. "Many people had to borrow and change their expenditure patterns," says Dorosh, now a senior rural development economist with the World Bank, "but for the most part they managed to avoid serious adverse nutrition consequences from the flooding."

According to Margaret Arnold, the director/program manager of the World Bank's Hazard Management Unit, "Poor countries tend to think of investments in disaster prevention and preparedness as luxuries that they can't afford." The evidence shows, however, that disaster preparedness can be a more cost-effective approach than recovery. In an area subject to annual flooding in the Indian state of Bihar, Tearfund, a UK nongovernmental organization (NGO), and the Discipleship Centre, an Indian NGO, have teamed up with villagers to prepare ahead of time for the inundations.Villagers have built up embankments that serve as evacuation routes, installed hand pumps whose spigots are raised above likely flood levels so that drinking water is not contaminated, and developed evacuation procedures. An analysis by Tearfund showed that every rupee invested in flood preparedness generated 3.8 rupees in benefits, says Sarah La Trobe, Tearfund’s policy adviser for environment and disasters.

Indeed, a study by the World Bank and U.S. Geological Survey calculated that US$40 million invested in disaster preparedness, mitigation, and prevention in the 1990s would have reduced economic losses by US$280 million--a sevenfold return. Yet, although communities and governments are taking some steps to make these investments, international donors still tend to focus much of their resources on disaster recovery rather than prevention.

Despite the international community's emphasis on disaster recovery, foreign NGOs and relief teams are not the first helpers on the scene when disaster strikes. "It is an established fact that in natural disasters, particularly in the post-disaster emergency phases, the survival needs of disadvantaged people are met by the people themselves, their extended families, and nearest communities," says Muhammad Saidur Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Centre. It can take international relief teams days or weeks to arrive, a period during which help from family and neighbors can mean the difference between life and death. Given this reality, argues Saidur Rahman, much more should be done to improve the capacity of local populations to recover from disasters.

Besides destroying lives, disasters devastate livelihoods and economies. After Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in two centuries, pounded Honduras in 1998, the country's president claimed its development had been set back 50 years. Tens of thousands of people were left homeless, infrastructure was destroyed, crops were wiped out, and thousands of families were left with no source of income. A World Bank/ProVention Consortium study of the recovery in Honduras revealed that four years after the hurricane, people affected still reported being worse off than before the hurricane.

"One major lesson of Hurricane Mitch and other disasters," says Arnold of the World Bank, "is that no one has paid enough attention to livelihood recovery." Some ways of helping rebuild livelihoods, she says, are to use local labor as much as possible for debris removal and reconstruction, giving cash payments in support of livelihoods, and promoting microfinance programs.

So far, the international community appears to be applying this lesson in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. More than 1 million people live in the coastal areas affected by the tsunami, and restoring their livelihoods will take not weeks or months, but years. A number of efforts are underway especially to help fisherfolk, perhaps the most heavily affected group, as well as farmers, rebuild their livelihoods. The WorldFish Center, for example, will lead an initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to develop a long-term rehabilitation action plan for agriculture and fisheries in the tsunami-affected regions. Over the next five years, the initiative will manage a flexible coalition of donors, research and government agencies, NGOs, and civil society to identify options and implement plans for promoting sustainable livelihoods and reducing future disaster risk. Scientists from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) have also begun identifying rice production problems in countries hit by the tsunami, which deposited large amounts of salt in coastal soils, and are responding to requests from Malaysia and Sri Lanka for seeds of saline-tolerant rice varieties suitable for growing in tsunami-affected areas.

One effective way of spreading the economic risk of disaster--insurance--has traditionally not been available to poor people, but this is beginning to change. After a 1999 earthquake in the Marmara region of Turkey, the World Bank helped introduce the Turkish Catastrophic Insurance Pool.The pool is an intermediary between homeowners and the commercial reinsurance market, and because of the pool's size, coverage is affordable for poor homeowners.

Innovative insurance schemes are also being proposed to help farmers recover from natural disasters. According to Peter Hazell, director of IFPRI’s Development Strategy and Governance Division, insurance indexed to natural hazards is being tried in a couple of places. Under index insurance, farmers are not insured when they alone suffer losses, but rather when a specific, measurable level of hazard, such as drought or heavy rainfall, is recorded in their district or region. Index insurance contracts could be written against other measurable natural disasters, such as high winds or earthquakes. Private insurers in India have begun pilot programs offering insurance indexed to drought and excess rainfall, and the Mongolian government is undertaking a pilot program of insurance indexed to livestock mortality rates.

"The idea of insurance is to spread the costs of natural disasters more effectively around the world," says Hazell. "Insurance can also provide better incentives so that people do not take more risk than necessary. For example, in the United States people would build fewer houses in hurricane-prone areas if the full cost of any insurance fell on the owners. But when Uncle Sam picks up much of the loss, then everybody is ready to build!"

In January 2005 the United Nations held its World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, itself the scene of a deadly earthquake in 1995. In the Hyogo Declaration adopted at the conference, delegates recognized "the intrinsic relationship between disaster reduction, sustainable development, and poverty reduction." According to Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Famine Center of Tufts University, "This is important. Disasters, at this conference and hopefully from now on, will be seen essentially as an expression of development failure, and their reduction as a matter of good governance, risk reduction, and livelihood focus."

Part of good governance, then, includes taking account of disaster risks."We need to get out of the mentality that disaster policy is about civil defense and that’s all," says Maria Olga Gonzalez, a disaster program specialist with the UNDP Disaster Reduction Unit. "A country’s risk profile should shape its development policies."

Incorporating natural disaster considerations into national and local development policies may involve making financial investments or foregoing some development paths. But, says Gonzalez, "it's not always expensive. Sometimes it just requires a different way of doing things."

Urban and housing policies may have to change, to avoid having large numbers of poor people settled in makeshift housing on riverbanks and unstable hillsides. Enforcement of building standards may need to be tightened--earthquakes are shown to kill many more people and destroy more property in countries where populations are urbanizing rapidly and where building standards and land-use planning have consequently been lax. Some development may need to be directed away from coastal areas, which are highly vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding.

In many cases, policies and programs that reduce disaster risk also support development efforts more broadly. Irrigation is a good example, says Hazell. It not only reduces farmers’ vulnerability to drought but also increases their average production and incomes.

Similarly, investments in communications and transportation infrastructure serve the economy at large and can be crucial during a natural disaster. Microcredit programs can help poor people achieve sustainable livelihoods, as well as helping them get back on their feet after a crisis. Programs to improve community disaster preparedness can also help build social networks that are useful day to day.

Local communities and central governments bear much of the responsibility of doing more to prepare for and mitigate the effects of natural disasters. But the international donor community, says La Trobe, has a "particular responsibility." At the January Kobe conference,Tearfund was one of several groups pushing for clear disaster reduction actions, and although delegates agreed to take action, they did not commit themselves to concrete timetables or targets. "It makes no moral or economic sense to ignore the urgent need for disaster prevention," says La Trobe.

So far, the international community remains much more ready to respond after disaster strikes than to invest in preparedness and prevention. But the need for these investments is becoming more urgent. Not only have natural disasters become more frequent in recent decades, but they are also more costly in terms of both economic losses and number of people affected. As climate change occurs, it is likely to produce more extreme weather events like cyclones, heavy rainfall, and drought. Environmental degradation and population growth may also increase the impact of future natural disasters.

Will the Indian Ocean tsunami help highlight the need for broad and sustained action at every level to reduce disaster risks, or will it briefly attract attention and divert resources from other recent and current disasters before national governments and the international community return to business as usual? The tremendous response to the tsunami by donors around the world is encouraging, but now public and private actors must take steps to prevent the next disaster.