October 13: International Day for Disaster Reduction.

“2015: Knowledge for life”

Luis Fermin Turiel Peredo

Geographer / Director of Comprehensive Security

For twenty-six years we have celebrated on this date the International Day for Disaster Reduction, when the United Nations General Assembly determined the need for global awareness for the implementation and development of a culture of disaster reduction, which includes three levels of action: prevention, mitigation and preparation of institutions and citizens.

The motto of the International Day for Disaster Reduction of this year 2015: “Knowledge for Life”, It is based on the idea of taking advantage of the traditional knowledge of our local communities as a complement to modern science in order to combine the old experiences lived by each individual and the resilience of these ancestral societies.

We must take advantage of the celebration of this International Day for Disaster Reduction to continue supporting people, groups and administrations that, thanks to awareness-raising efforts on the importance of disaster reduction, have already become aware of this serious problem. But it is also a good time to encourage the rest of the citizens and authorities, who watch these phenomena and their consequences as outsiders, to get involved and take an active part in building a society that is more resilient to disasters.

When we talk about disasters, we must not forget the complexity of risk analysis or the levels of overlapping elements and threat levels involved in safety and emergency planning. Everyone has remembered how a natural disaster, such as the earthquake in northwestern Japan in March 2011, was linked to another technological disaster derived from it, when a series of technical incidents occurred that led to the nuclear accident at Fukushima I; that is, a “technological” disaster due to its consequences of nuclear, radiological and chemical contamination.

The recent approval by the United Nations General Assembly last June of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 stresses the intention of member countries to intensify efforts to strengthen disaster risk reduction in order to reduce the loss of life and property resulting from disasters worldwide, with an emphasis on developing operations that contemplate multiple threats and are multisectoral.

In Cantabria, the new executive has announced that it is preparing a new Land Law as well as a Regional Land Use PlanThese instruments must be based on a reflection on how the use of geographic space is a determining factor in the production of disasters. This regulatory framework should be the product of joint efforts by the entire Cantabrian society, assuming that in order to reduce the loss of life and property resulting from disasters, it is necessary to adopt restrictions on the use of the territory when developing territorial planning.

It is not possible to talk about good governance in the strategies of Civil defense for disaster risk reduction, whether at local, regional, national or international level, if we forget the relationship between disaster and territory, and how risk factors acquire greater or lesser incidence rates for the population, the environment or the economy, depending on their location.

Strategies for mitigating disaster threats must be multi-sectoral and multi-level. For example, not considering the Climate Change As a determining factor that will significantly impact the increase in disaster risk in the coming decades, it would mean a failure and weakening of prevention policies and processes.

Therefore, we must take advantage of the opportunity offered by these right now. territorial planning instruments for the delimitation of vulnerable areas in order to achieve a reduction in the risks of existing disasters; as well as the prevention of the appearance of new ones derived from Nature itself or from our human activities due to a lack of culture in the territory that we temporarily occupy.

We must be aware of the messy and complex legal order which encompasses the concept of disaster or catastrophe, whether due to the multiple threats that may occur, the scale or dimension of the disaster, its frequency or evolution. But the safeguarding of a single human life is well worth the effort of implementing legal, political, social and economic measures that increase the resilience of our society in the face of the vicissitudes for which we are almost always responsible.

We therefore trust that this International Day for Disaster Reduction serve to raise awareness among our leaders and society in general about the importance of policies Disaster Risk Reduction, adopting specific measures through the territorial planning instruments currently under review, to combat the factors that increase the risk of disasters and significantly slow progress towards sustainable development in Cantabria.