Winning over a never- ending battle

One hundred twenty-three (123) elementary students, studying at San Jose Central Elementary School in Tacloban, died on November 2013. After the storm cleared and after some rebuilding, classes resumed. With their children gone, some mothers continued their daily routine of going to the school to fetch their kids, even if there was no more son or daughter to fetch. Maybe it was therapy, or maybe it was simply a tragedy so unbearable that healing required them to be in denial. On graduation day, seats were reserved for the graduating students who had passed away. With only their pictures attached to their seats, their names were called. We could only imagine these students smiling from heaven that time, but the rest of the school wept.

To the rest of the world, it may be a climate change issue. But to those affected by personal tragedies, happiness—the way they know it—can be as elusive as preventing loss of life and property from natural calamities.

Yet this is the motivation that drives the public and private sector to work together to promote proactive efforts in establishing preparedness before the storm. In a natural disaster, government absorbs damages to public property and incurs substantial costs from rebuilding and relief operations. Private companies suffer losses not only from property damage, but also business interruptions or slowdowns. Urban development can retrogress and quality of life of communities can be negatively impacted as well.

On this matter, a creative collaboration spearheaded by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) sought to build an alliance on a global scale among the public and private sector leaders to invest in prevention and development to reduce risks from disasters. This ambitious initiative is called R!SE. The Philippines, reportedly the country which is third most prone to natural calamities, is the venue of the launch of R!SE in Asia.

The UN was able to build an early alliance with global organizations such as PwC, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), AECOM and Willis to share and collaborate on how to reduce economic losses from disasters.

One R!SE initiative that should appeal to every city is an evaluation of the city’s resiliency against natural disasters. AECOM has issued a 10-point checklist on what are the essentials on how to make cities resilient. But the most important ingredient is political will, even honest humility on the part of local government to really understand and admit to the insufficiencies, and work with intensity to get to a disaster-resilient state.

Another interesting eye-opener is that cities, in particular, public property can be insured from natural disasters. The education on this area of insurance is being tackled by Willis. Conceptually, it could be one of the most important things to protect from retrogression. Understanding this science is one part, and succeeding in congressional budget allocation for this project is the other half.

If R!SE is too macro for our individual readers, maybe a few tips on how we as individuals can help resiliency is in order. (And I know there are so much more, so please email your inputs):

1. If you use paper, plant a tree. According to conservatree.org, one tree makes about 15 reams of copy paper, or about 8,000 sheets. Our firm, like other corporations, uses tons of paper. In 2014, our firm used 4.4 million sheets of paper. But to pay for the paper we used, we planted 535 trees in different parts of the metro last year.

2. Spend on the “preventive strengthening” of your houses. For instance, talk to your contractor to see if your roof trusses are thick and strong enough. And reevaluate if your roof material (the issue of galvanized vs. galvalume, for example) is appropriate to withstand 300 kph of wind. There is a Vietnam Case Study for the UN’s Building Disaster Resilient Communities that provides 10 key principles on typhoon-resistant construction, which we can share in our Facebook fan page if I can get my hands on it.

3. If you throw trash indiscriminately, may that trash find its way back to you. My apologies for this statement, but it’s made out of exasperation of seeing people throw out their trash from their car to the street, on the sidewalk while walking, to the sea (sometimes by deliberate dumping), and just about anywhere where there is no trash can. And we do not even need to discuss the effects on flooding. This culture of indiscriminately throwing trash needs to stop. Let us all be exasperated about it.

For a country visited by 20 typhoons a year, and with a devastating event every 2.5 years (based on a US study), extra effort by the private sector and individual citizens towards development and rebuilding will always be on call, on top of what the government can muster.

I take this opportunity to salute all that the public and private sectors have done beyond the call of their job descriptions. So much help, so many efforts and individuals worth emulating. So much has been done. But in this new normal, much will be required constantly from all of us, to minimize the damage and to temper the pain.

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Alexander B. Cabrera is the chairman and senior partner of Isla Lipana & Co./PwC Philippines. He also chairs the tax committee of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP). Email your comments and questions to a[email protected]. This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.