18th Meeting of the Select Committee – May 3, 2005

At the 18th meeting, the Chairperson Mahinda Samarasinghe tabled the first draft of the Natural Disaster Bill done by the UNDP. He also announced that the draft report on the recommendations made during the Australian study tour undertaken by a parliamentary delegation was released.

Jeff Murdoch, Akira Akazawa and Ramraj Narasingham from the International Organization of Migration (IOM), Dr A R Subbiah and Lolita Bildhan from the Bangkok based Asian Disaster Prevention Centre, Jean Pierre Massue, Member of the European Mediterranean Inter Governmental Group and of the European Academy of Science and Arts, and Nora Belachchi, expert on natural disasters made their presentations to the Select Committee.

Dr A R Subbiah made an assessment of the Early Warning System for Sri Lanka for the UNDP. He stated that the relevant authorities need to trace the movement of the winds to warn of imminent danger of floods in the area. Sri Lanka’s lack of a flood warning system was a deterrent to the monitoring of the impact of floods. Speaking on droughts, he stated that authorities need to possess the ability to forecast them in advance. International forecasters can predict changes in weather patterns through the use of Global Precipitation Forecasts three months ahead. Dr Subbiah also stressed the importance of delivering locally relevant climate information so that authorities can preempt this and plan the agriculture industry accordingly.

Jean Pierre Massue spoke on the local levels of disaster preparedness and emergency response in Sri Lanka. An ISCR survey called ‘Preliminary Lessons learned from the Tsunami’ conducted in Kobe showed that the world is vulnerable to natural disasters and people need to look into the careful conservation of the coast, he said. He stressed the need for Sri Lanka to invest in mapping data called Geographic Information System (GIS). He made several recommendations to the Select Committee based on his research. He stated that there were five key areas that need to be looked into when having an Early Warning System:

• Risk Prevention
• Elements involved in an Early Warning System
• Crisis Management
• Debriefing
• Rehabilitation

He also stressed that there has to be a legal basis when making policy decisions and capacity building should be based on an inter-ministerial and decentralized approach. When speaking on the importance of education he said that children are the most vulnerable to natural disasters and are also the most receptive to risk prevention messages.