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Education and Local Traditions are Crucial when Living with Risks - Experts Find at 5th Bonn Dialogues
The four international expert panelists at the 5th Bonn Dialogues agreed that education is significant to prepare people to cope with risks and disasters. Dr Badaoui Rouhban (UNESCO), Prof Benouar Djillali (USTHB), Dr Zinaida Fadeeva (UNU-IAS) and Dr Manu Gupta (SEED) also stressed that local cultures and traditions can help when implementing risk reduction behavior in the long term.
There is no such phenomenon as a natural disaster, people and politicians seem to forget. There is only a natural hazard that can become a disaster, emphasized the experts and pointed to the role of education. “Education is so important because it provides skills that can decide whether someone will survive or die,” said Dr Djillali from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB).
With the global climate changing and growing population pressure, more and more people are in danger and need to be educated about coping strategies. “Today, environmental hazards are increasing and so are risks,” said Dr Rouhban from the UNESCO.
Regarding the understanding of disasters, the experts agreed that there is already sufficient knowledge, but it ought to be applied better. “There is very little uncertainty. We know about the risks occurring, how often they occur and about their severity”, said said Dr Rouhban. “Today, we have the knowledge, what is missing is the implementation.”
Reducing Our Vulnerability
Tackling these increasing risks and implementing coping strategies needs to be at the top of the agenda. “We have to adapt to the risks by reducing our vulnerability,” said Dr Djillali. In practical terms, this means to “first assess the hazard; then reduce the vulnerability, like insufficient education, bad economy, or population density”, he explained.
However, disseminating the knowledge and using education to prepare people to live with risks takes time. “It’s a very long learning process,” said Dr Gupta, from the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEED).
In order to be effective, solutions have to become part of the culture, a routine, practiced in every day life. All experts stated Japan as a positive example of how education can be used to create a culture of risk reduction behavior. “In Japan, the culture of risk is so much embedded in the programme at schools, there is a culture of exercising,” said Dr Rouhban. And he added: “In some communities in Japan, there are people, who map the vulnerable spots for cases of emergency.”
Coping strategies seem to work best, when they are in line with people’s culture. Therefore, the four panelists strongly agreed on the importance of working with local communities and using their traditional knowledge and culture traits in risk reduction education.
Accepting Different Viewpoints
In the end, local people´s perceptions decide whether an environment is defined risky or which magnitudes and losses are perceived a disaster. “How many people die, and how many deaths are being accepted, depends on the culture and the economic situation,” said Dr Djillali. These different viewpoints need to be accepted. “People need to ask themselves, what is the hazard we´re living with on the ground, what is the vulnerability? Each society can choose their own acceptable level of risk, as long as they are aware of it, it´s fine,” said Dr Fadeeva from the United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS).
Knowing about the risks means to take responsibility for it. Therefore future education is crucial for all societies, so the tenor of the evening. Especially the civil society plays a major role.
This active approach however needs to be supported by policy makers who usually focus on risk reduction measures when a disaster is occurring. Because of the long term effects, risk reduction is not a topic decision makers take on easily. “They don’t see immediate results,” said Dr Gupta. In order to educate people in risk reduction behavior, governments have to acknowledge the topic and pay attention to it constantly.
