Governments in Asia's most catastrophe-prone areas should set aside one-tenth of their development funds to limit the risk of disaster, especially given the impact of climate change, Reuters quoted a U.N. official as saying today. The world spent $12 billion on humanitarian responses to disasters last year, and 99 percent of those killed by natural phenomena were in the Asia Pacific region, said John Holmes, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, during a visit to Jakarta. "A 10 percent figure of what you are spending on response or even on development should go into disaster risk reduction because that is a good investment," he said. Holmes toured West Sumatra on Wednesday, visiting areas where a magnitude 7.6 quake in late September triggered landslides, killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed more than 130,000 homes. Before visiting Indonesia, Holmes had stopped in Manila, which was been badly hit by tropical storms recently. Holmes said that the Indonesian and international response to the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra, was one of the more successful he had seen, but that building codes needed to be enforced to minimise the impact of the next natural disaster. "All development measures should have disaster risk reduction measures built into them," he said, adding that disaster risk reduction should also be built into discussions on a world climate pact that will take place in Copenhagen in December. "That also has to be part of the wider Copenhagen discussions and negotiations in December in order to ensure that not only do we focus on reducing emissions to tackle climate change at its source but also to make sure we are focusing on the adaptation side," he said. "In other words, helping developing countries cope with the effects of climate change which are with us right now and disaster risk reduction is very much a part of that."
