20110328_R5

Source: BBC Radio 5 Live

URL: N/A

Date: 28/03/2011

Event: Paddy Ashdown warns of the mega-emergencies to come

People:

Paddy Ashdown: The Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
Nicky Campbell: Presenter, BBC Radio 5 Live

Nicky Campbell: Lord Ashdown, good morning. Right, you've been looking at a question which is a really interesting one. How well - and I'll ask you about Libya in a minute, but this is key as well - how well does the British Government react to major humanitarian disasters, right? So -

Paddy Ashdown: Pretty good, Nicky -

Nicky Campbell: Pretty good? Yeah?

Paddy Ashdown: Yeah, I mean look - DFID's [UK Government's Department for International Development] a pretty extraordinary organisation. We've done seven months on this review, been across the world from Pakistan through to New York and the truth is that DFID's a leader in these things. It's a highly respected... It does a good job and we should be proud of it. But - and here's the point - things are about to change radically. What we've seen recently - Typhoon Nargis, the tsunami of Japan of course, Pakistan floods, Haiti - we conclude that these are not some strange aberration from the past, they're a prediction of the future.

Nicky Campbell: In what sense a prediction of the future?

Paddy Ashdown: Well, we're going to see more of them, more of these mega-emergencies, as global warming increases -

Nicky Campbell: How do we know that?

Paddy Ashdown: Look, we - look, when we started this, Pakistan floods had just taken place and we began to think this was the conclusion. Since when, we already know what's happened, including of course Japan -

Nicky Campbell: We've always had floods and natural disasters - read your Bible.

Paddy Ashdown: Yeah, but - indeed so. But not on the scale that we have seen recently. Not on the scale of Haiti, not on the scale of the Pakistan floods and the reason for this is twofold, basically twofold. One is increasing global warming, in the Himalaya/Hindu Kush area in particular - the third greatest concentration of snow and ice in the world, now melting faster than anywhere else on Earth. Er, feeding a sixth of the world's population. And the second is increasing population densities, in places like Pakistan, people are living in the flood plains where they've never lived before. So we believe these are going to be more frequent, and what that means is, Nicky, that being good as DFID is, isn't going to be good enough. We're going to have to look at ways that we change completely the way that we deal with these. And the key conclusion we reach is that science does enable us to predict what's going to happen. Let me give you a baleful fact - we know there is going to be probably a very big earthquake in Katmandu. We don't know when, but we know it's going to come. We know there'll be more floods. Now can we be ahead of events instead of always reacting behind them? Can we be more anticipatory in our approach, and above all can we build up the resilience of those countries which are at risk? Second big conclusion - the leadership of the international community on these matters, and Haiti showed it, and so as the Pakistan floods, is, frankly, rubbish. We're wasting lives, we're wasting money and wasting opportunities, and we have to deal with this more professionally.

Nicky Campbell: If what you say is right about global warming - there are those who dispute that, they'll say earthquakes are nothing to do with global warming, for example, but maybe floods are something to do with it -

Paddy Ashdown: Well, you can dispute that too, but that's - go on?

Nicky Campbell: What can you dispute?

Paddy Ashdown: You can dispute the fact - and this is the point, that if you're talking about the volumes of water which are now being leaked into the Earth system, particularly around this - what people call the Third Pole, the Hindu/Himalayan Kush [sic] , which is - the Himalayas/Hindu Kush, which is very actively geological reasons - regions - some believe that that itself is destabilising the crust. So - I mean -

Nicky Campbell: Okay, right.

Paddy Ashdown: - there's an argument to be made but - let's go on...

Nicky Campbell: So what needs to change here, domestically, in the way that we organise DFID?

Paddy Ashdown: We need to do a number of things. DFID needs to recognise that what it does with its partners is more important than what it does by itself. It needs to build new partnerships with China, with India, with the private sector, on innovation, with NGOs and with its current partners the U.S. and the European community. And secondly, it needs to take this issue. If resilience is the key of this, then it can't deal with humanitarian emergencies simply as a little, sort of, pimple - offshoot of its job - it has to take that into the core of what DFID does, and it has, above all, to include that in its development policy. So part of your development policy, which DFID regards as its core task - rightly so, too, and does a very good job there - has to be about building up resilience in at-risk countries.