The international disaster-relief community is overstretched, with killer earthquakes, hurricanes and famines from New Orleans to Niger and Pakistan competing for public attention and charitable dollars, according to United Nations and private relief officials.
The amount of donations for the deadly earthquake in Pakistan and flooding in Central America have come in at a slower pace than for other recent calamities, officials say.
Two major disasters during the past year Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami have sapped funding for other causes and contributed to what experts call “donor fatigue” among governments that finance the UN’s efforts and individual givers who support private agencies.
“I’ve never seen a year quite like this one,” said Carolyn Miles, the head of operations for the relief agency Save the Children.
The UN is struggling to tap new sources of funding, including corporations that contributed more than $700 million (Dh2.56 billion) to the Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort, and establish a more reliable funding stream through a Global Emergency Fund.
It has also stepped up pressure on oil-rich countries in the Gulf area to provide regular contributions to the more than 25 emergency relief operations it has around the world.
UN relief agencies, meanwhile, have been borrowing helicopters and staff from other relief operations around the world to respond to the Pakistan quake.
“Our resources are extremely strained,” said Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, a senior official in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Our main concern still remains the funding.”
Government pledges to victims of the October 8 earthquake in Pakistan have reached more than $150 million (Dh550 million), a considerable figure, but only a small fraction of the billions of dollars in pledges made by governments to the tsunami victims.
The UN, which issued an appeal for $272 million (Dh1 billion) for Pakistan, has received pledges of $50 million (Dh183.5 million).
The varying levels of aid in part reflect the scale of the disasters.
The December 26 tsunami killed more than 200,000 people in nine countries, while the Pakistan earthquake has killed more than 45,000 people along the India-Pakistan border and driven more than 3 million from their homes.
But the rare occurrence of such a deadly tidal wave and the impact it had on travel destinations catering to Western tourists generated unprecedented attention and giving.
“We saw tourists fleeing for their lives,” said Trevor Rowe, a spokesman for the World Food Programme. “We don’t have that in Pakistan.”
Rowe said that UN agencies have faced a growing number of natural disasters over the past 15 years. He cited a study by the German insurance company Munich Re that documents a nearly threefold increase in natural disasters from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Save the Children maintains that overall funding to relief agencies has dropped since the tsunami.
The organisation raised more than $5 million (Dh18.35 million) in donations in the first week after the tsunami struck.
So far, it has taken in nearly $1 million (Dh3.67 million) for earthquake victims in Pakistan and India and $8,000 (Dh29,350) for Central American flood victims.
“We saw a tremendous outpouring of support for the tsunami and less support for emergencies that followed,” said Eileen Burke of Save the Children.
Difficult to focus
UN officials and private relief agencies say that, while governments and the public continue to fund far-away operations, they have had trouble focusing attention on more than one disaster at a time.
Private contributors gave more than $40,000 (Dh147,000) this August in response to a Care USA internet appeal for Niger famine victims.
But the donations dried up immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and inundating large sections of New Orleans.
“In August, we were getting a surprisingly large number [of donations] for Niger after the BBC and CNN started flashing pictures of children starving, but Katrina knocked Niger off the map,” said Lurma Rackley, the head of public relations for Care USA.
The American Red Cross raised $1.2 billion (Dh4.4 billion) for Katrina and $556 million (Dh2 billion) for the tsunami.
But it has so far raised $1.6 million (Dh5.8 million) for Pakistan and does not keep figures on the Central American floods.
Pakistan’s case for funding has received a boost from the Bush administration, which pledged an initial $50 million (Dh183.5 million) and donated helicopters and other military equipment to participate in the relief effort.
The United States hopes that its expression of generosity will also bolster its standing in the Muslim state. “Pakistan’s a friend, and America will help,” Bush said.
UN officials and relief agencies say that the initial response to Pakistan has been far more promising than for Central America, where at least 2,000 people died from flooding and mudslides.
The UN has received $3 million (Dh11 million) of the $30 million (Dh110 million) it requested for Guatemala and El Salvador. Most of that, about $2.5 million (Dh9.1 million), came from Sweden.
The Bush administration has also pledged about $1.9 million (Dh6.9 million) in aid to Guatemala and El Salvador.
“The disparities with Central America are stark,” said George Rupp, president of the International Rescue Committee. Rupp said that Katrina has made Americans much more sensitive to the needs of foreigners afflicted by natural calamities.
But he said it has also made them more mindful of the limits of aid in getting people back on their feet. “They have a more sober understanding of the limits to what a contribution can achieve,” he said. “I guess we could say that’s a form of donor fatigue.”

What can be done about disasters
Mark Bartolini

By any standard the natural disasters of the past year have been unprecedented in scale and scope. The international aid organisation I work for, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), only rarely responds to natural disasters. The majority of our work is with war-affected populations and in domestic refugee resettlement.
But in the past 10 months we have responded worldwide to disasters of historic proportions: the tsunami in Aceh, hurricane Katrina in the United States, and now the earthquake in Pakistan.
There are three critical facts about the nature of disaster: Better warning systems and improved evacuation plans are imperative to saving lives in predictable disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes; spending money on preventive or mitigating measures is likely to be much less expensive than rebuilding after a disaster strikes; when aid is insufficient, vulnerable populations are at greatest risk.
In countries that have few resources and where access by rescue operations is limited, the impact of a disaster is often compounded by the outbreak of disease or the inability to provide sufficient aid to the wounded and displaced.
This has been well documented. Studies of large-scale displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and northern Iraq following the first Gulf War reveal that more people die from normally treatable diseases than because of violence.
The lesson here is obvious: Without adequate access to resources it is the most vulnerable especially children and elderly who are at the greatest risk.
This paradigm applies in both man-made and natural disasters. Compare the aftermath of Katrina, the tsunami and the earthquake in Kobe with what is now happening in Pakistan.
While the response to Pakistan’s earthquake is ongoing, there is a growing fear because of insufficient access, logistic capacity and resources of a second deadly crisis stemming from untreated injuries, outbreaks of disease, exposure to the coming winter and malnutrition.
Such a crisis in the aftermath of Katrina along America’s Gulf Coast was avoided because of the myriad interventions of state, federal, Red Cross, non-governmental and individual responders to provide healthcare and shelter.
While not without problems, this infrastructure is a critical component of limiting a disaster’s ripple effect.
Too much is not good
Similarly, the unprecedented level of financial support to non-governmental agencies, many of which have experience in dealing with large-scale displacement and the swift response of militaries with their logistical capacity, staved off an even greater disaster in the far-flung regions affected by last year’s tsunami.
Another lesson to be drawn: Financial contributions can, and often do, help save lives. But money alone does not ensure the most effective response.
An abundance of resources means an abundance of responders, which presents its own unique coordination challenges. This was true in the tsunami and with hurricane Katrina.
One of the most significant challenges is to generate information that is critical to an effective response and disseminate it across the broadest spectrum of responders.
Admittedly, this is a difficult task. Even in the most developed nations, the scale of a crisis can overwhelm the systems that are in place.
The failures in the first five days after Katrina struck demonstrate just how important co-ordination, logistics and flexibility are to an effective early response.
The lack of an integrated effort to collect and share information meant that gaps, duplication, lost capacity, inappropriate responses, misunderstanding of roles and significant time spent searching for answers all hampered the response.
Still, it warrants notice that in the early days of a crisis where large-scale displacement or fatalities occur, a significant level of chaos is bound to ensue.
Even the best plans take time to coalesce as responders prepare to deploy. Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 1 million people, more than the most hard-hit area of the tsunami, the island of Sumatra and far surpassing the numbers displaced by the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
The earthquake in Pakistan has displaced a staggering 3 million people. Putting in place appropriate systems and making them known across the widest array of responders prior to the onset of a crisis is critical to minimising that period of chaos.
Another critical lesson in these numbers is that disasters are always cheaper, in both human and financial terms, to avoid or mitigate than they are to fix.
While hurricanes and earthquakes may not be prevented, looking at the untold human suffering and the billions that will be spent for reconstruction, there is a strong case for investing in appropriate building codes, sensible planning, environmental mitigation and adequate early warning and evacuation plans.

Change in Britain: Why Tories are divided by Davids
Mark Lawson

IT’S commonly said that nobody believes any more what newspapers print or governments say. But is this conviction in our incredulity really well founded? A foreigner reading the British Press three weeks ago would have come to two firm conclusions: that David Davis would be the next Conservative leader, and that most of the UK was about to die from bird flu. These beliefs were held because they appeared with such repetition in the headlines.
The first article of faith is now a heresy, but the belief in the mass fatalities threatened by avian illness is still widely held. And, worryingly for those who promote the legend of a sceptical age, the reason that this story retains credibility is that not only does it appear daily in the newspapers, but it is based on a statement from a government inspector: the chief medical officer’s prediction that the arrival of feather-flown death is inevitable, eventually.
So the theme of the week is presumption: our strange conviction that, despite all the evidence of past events, we know exactly what is going to happen, like an audience at a murder mystery determined to pick the killer in the opening scene.
David Davis’ journey in around 20 days from heir presumptive to struggling underdog is a powerful reminder of the fact that politics is a strange race-track on which both the weights and the fences can change several times between starting-gun and finishing post, and on which all betting should sensibly be suspended.
There has been much discussion about Tony Blair’s influence on British politics, but one of his less acknowledged legacies is the importance of believing in the unknown and unseeable. I don’t mean by this to be rude about either his religious beliefs or his search for weapons of mass destruction, but to point out the way in which he has been alive to the potential for the unexpected in politics.
When I interviewed him after Labour’s defeat in 1992, when some friends were urging him to leave the Commons and return to law, the then Labour home affairs spokesman refused to accept the conventional wisdom that his party might remain out of power for decades. You just never knew what would happen, he said. The weakness of Westminster was an assumption that we knew what would come next.
Two shocks — Major and Lamont’s ERM fiasco, and John Smith’s death — proved this anti-Nostradamus spectacularly right. And this warning against thinking of politics as a linear narrative has lessons for both main parties this week. The Conservatives have certainly engineered a plot twist with the sudden rise of David Cameron, but there’s a risk that he may not be unexpected enough.
Cameron’s support seems to be based on the assumption that, in the next election, the Tories will face Gordon Brown in a Britain very similar to today’s. Labour’s play-book for the next campaign is based on the same projection. But if the emergence of Cameron proves anything, it is the danger of thinking that the script is written. Whatever your political rosette, it’s worth wearing a Don’t Know badge about the future.
The hysteria over catching our death from distant chickens is another sign of an age which is not coolly unfoolable, but is as credulous as those generations who gathered on hilltops on mystically designated Thursday evenings to wait for the world to end. Then, it was a false apocalypse; now it’s the assumption of mass fatalities from an illness that does not yet exist in easily transmittable human form.