Ben Wisner, hazards specialist with the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London argues that it would be a mistake to dismiss the Johannesburg Earth Summit. However, he says, the ability of mega-corporations to impose "globalisation from above" needs a grass-roots movement of "globalisation from below" to match and counter their political and economic power.Alexandra Township was known only to historians of the anti-apartheid struggle until the Johannesburg Earth Summit. Alexandra is now well known as the other pole of economic development and human well-being, referred to often by foreign journalists in juxtaposition to the high-class enclave of Stanton, where the summit is being held two miles away. I conducted research in Alexandra Township in 1995-97. I came with the intention of working on the problem of flash flooding that affects the area. Three small streams once flowed down the slope from Louis Botha Avenue to the Jukskei River to the East.These were long ago covered over, built over by shacks. Underground drains are supposed to carry run-off down to the river, but they are blocked by rubbish.In the northeast corner of Alexandra, near the cemetery, the Jukskei River cuts into 10-metre-high cliffs of compacted garbage. Here, shacks of former Mozambican war refugees and other marginal people fall regularly into the river. The statistically calculable "50-year flood" could destroy 900 shacks and endanger between 4,400 and 10,500 people. I thought people would have flood risk high on their mental agendas. However, so hard is life in Alexandra, so many the risks, that in focus group discussions flood never was ranked higher than number seven.More commonly, people mentioned water supply and sanitation, the danger to their children from speeding minibuses, shack fires, violence and bad air quality from the thousands of coal braziers used for cooking and for heat in the winter.On Sunday, a few days before the close of the summit, 40,000 people marched from Alexandra to the conference venue.What difference could the final declaration and programme of action make to the people who live in Alexandra?Could the Johannesburg Earth Summit make any difference to disaster vulnerability? Will it?GREAT POTENTIALThese are two separate questions. The potential is very great. For the first time, a major international meeting is focusing on the links among wealth, poverty, governance, the natural world and a variety of risks.These connections have seldom been highlighted in narrower, sectoral conferences, summits and decades of activity.Even the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) from 1990-99 didn’t do this. It dealt mostly with technical questions linking earth and atmospheric science with planning and policy.People’s access to basic services, such as water and electricity, were never addressed. During the last three years of the IDNDR, when attention was turned to reducing the earthquake risk in cities, whatever form and quality of municipal government in a participating city was accepted at face value, never questioned, never became part of the research.Water, sanitation and renewable energy have come up at Johannesburg in a more holistic way than they did during the International Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1980-89) or the World Conference on Energy, held in Nairobi in 1980.Agreement on targets for progress in water supply and renewable energy could have a big impact on disaster risk reduction.First, implemention of new water supply, sanitation and renewable energy projects in slums and villages where more than a billion people live would have to be done in a participatory fashion.Such a scale of infrastructure construction would be unfeasible, unsustainable, and possibly dangerous if it were conducted from the top down, using only contractors and private firms.It would be unfeasible because it would cost too much. It would be unsustainable because, without the benefit of local knowledge, such micro schemes would be hard to design well and would be costly to maintain without local involvement.CREEPING PRIVATISATIONThe danger comes from the creeping privatisation of public utilities. International corporations such as Bechtel and Vivendi Water Systems are running public water supplies in many countries.The cost to the consumer nearly always goes up with privatisation of water and electricity – one of the things being protested by the 40,000 people who marched from Alexandra to the site of the Johannesburg Earth Summit.So, assuming citizens would be involved in a variety of ways in such new water and energy schemes, the spin-offs for increased local networking and self-organisation could be great.People who are better organised can more easily become better prepared, better able to respond to hazard warnings, better able to demand attention to hazards by government.Second, there are also some very specific technical links between a variety of common natural hazards and improvements in access to water and clean energy. In the course of most local, small-scale water projects, an opportunity arises for residents to study and to become more aware of the topography and hydrography of the watershed where they live.Early warning of flash flooding could easily be built in to this phase of a water project.The use of renewable energy for domestic purposes such as cooking would prevent the felling of trees that anchor slopes and prevent landslides and reduce the risk of flooding.Natural hazards research has shown that it is not only better organised localities that have the capacity to resist extreme events and resilience to recover quickly, but also localities composed of well-nourished and healthy individuals and households with diverse and productive livelihoods.CLIMATE INSTABILITYGains in security for the most vulnerable people in the world resulting from successful small-scale water and energy projects could easily be wiped out by climate instability.This would work in several ways. First, the frequency and severity of extreme events, both floods and droughts, is likely to increase. There is evidence that this is already happening.Second, many of the poor will continue to be plagued and weakened by epidemics of dengue fever, malaria, and other insect-borne diseases that accompany El Nino events.Third, development assistance finance is likely to be diverted by rich countries that have got to spend hundred of billions of dollars or euros on their own coastal defences against rising sea levels and flooding.To the credit of the Johannesburg Summit, the plight of the small farmer who faces low prices and high costs for imported fertiliser has been discussed.A reorganisation of the world’s trading system that levels the playing field for the multitude of small farmers could revolutionise livelihoods and bring about greater capacity to resist extreme natural events and resilience to recover from them.In the end, the accountability and competence of local governments will make or break the implementation of even a minimal Johannesburg agenda. Water, sanitation, renewable energy projects will need local oversight and protection from theft, corruption, and diversion for the benefit of local elites.At the national level, agreements about access to rich countries' agricultural markets will be implemented by governments that in many cases have not been democratically elected and are not accountable to their citizens.The march of 40,000 in Johannesburg was impressive for its restraint and understated power.There is an international politics that rejects or limits targets for water, sanitation and renewable energy, and that has produced so far only a small percentage of the $10 billion Kofi Annan wants to combat AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. This is the politics of globalisation from above, in which mega-corporations – oil companies, pharmaceutical, chemical and biotech corporations, agribusiness, and the war industries – dominate the policy making by national governments.Whatever the outcome of summits such as Johannesburg, it will take a massive, oppositional globalisation from below to match and counter this political and economic power.
A woman carries water in a makeshift camp at the Petion ville club Port-au-Prince February 9, 2010. The 7.0 magnitude quake which struck Haiti on Jan. 12 is estimated to have ...
