Muralee Thummarukudy, currently Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction at United Nations Environment Programme, has an international career spanning more than two decades. A PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Dr. Thummarukdy started his career at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Nagpur, India), before moving onto join Shell group of companies,first serving in Brunei and then in Oman. In 2003, Dr. Thummarukudy moved to the United Nations and has since then been involved in response and follow of almost all major conflicts and disasters in the 21st Century, be it the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2005 or the ongoing Syrian conflict. During his recent visit to Bangalore, Dr.Thummarukudy spoke to our student editor Jacob G. Kuruvilla.

Jacob G. Kuruvilla: Sir, I am delighted to have this opportunity to interview you for our school magazine. While our students all read about disasters, they don’t know a lot about the systems that exist globally to deal with them. Could you elaborate on that?

MT: Thank you, Jacob. I am always happy to talk to youngsters and am delighted to have this opportunity to interact with them.

In the past decade, we have heard more about disasters than the decades before it. The Indian Ocean Tsunami, which impacted more than 16 nations and killed over quarter million people, is probably one of the worst we have seen in recent history and a landmark in the collective memory of our generation. It created lot of awareness about the huge potential for disasters to cause death and destruction. It also strengthened the resolve of the international community to deal with such disasters in future.

Before talking about global systems, I want to emphasise that the most effective disaster response systems are at local level. More than 99% of the people rescued in a disaster are rescued by their family and neighbours. It will take time for government or international systems to roll in and respond to an emergency and often it is too little and too late. So it is most important that we have better awareness about disasters at the level of the individual and the community. Strengthened national systems are the next level and then finally comes the international systems.

Internationally, the United Nations System has decades of experience around the world in dealing with disasters. In the event of any disaster, be it from natural hazards such as earthquakes, or technology induced such as oil spills, countries facing the emergency situation can call upon the assistance of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) system. The system, based in Geneva, has trailed pool of experts from many parts of the world who can be deployed at very short notice to deal with the situation and assist the national government. In addition, individual UN agencies, such as World Health Organisation, UN International Childrens Fund, as well as other international organisations (such as CARE, Action Aid, Plan International) all have their own systems and capabilities, which are made available to the affected countries and communities.

JGK: Can you explain some of the new thinking in the field of disaster management?

MT: Like in every other domain of human activity, things are changing in the field of disaster management as well in response to societies expectations and technological evolution. I will first elaborate on the social aspects before going to technology.

In the past, those impacted by disaster were considered victims and disaster relief was considered an act of charity. This framework of thinking is now changing. Those who have gone through a disaster should be considered, and rightly so, as survivors of a disaster. These people have gone through an experience in life, which most people in the world have not or will not want to and they have come out alive. It is, therefore, only natural that we treat them with respect and dignity than sympathy and charity. They have every right to demand from humankind minimum support to re-establish their life. When we do that, we are not being charitable to them but just reinforcing that we are but one human race and it could be our turn to be at the receiving end tomorrow.

Technology is also changing disaster management rapidly. Availability of internet and mobile phones even in remote parts of the world is helping survivors and their support teams to seek help faster and people around the world to provide assistance. Tracing and tracking survivors and reconnecting them back to their families using google applications has become both common and effective. Social media is creating awareness, like never before, on disasters, their causes and impacts.

JGK: Why are there more disasters in the world now than in the past?

MT: This is an important question, but not an easy one. It is true that there are a lot more people impacted and economic loss caused by disasters, but luckily long term trends of fatalities are going down.

Analyses of disaster trends around the world make clear a few things. Firstly, many disasters happen because developmental activities, be it creating new houses, communities or infrastructure, are taking place in areas vulnerable to disasters. For example, more and more people are building their houses in flood plains or coastal areas for cost, convenience or aesthetic reasons. However, when a natural hazard, such as flood or hurricane occurs, these people are impacted and their investments are lost. The hazards were always there, and more often than not, are known. What is new is the exposure of communities and assets. Secondly, human activities are exacerbating natural hazards in many parts of the world. Unplanned urbanization without adequate provision for drainage and unscientific mountain agriculture and road building are increasing the potential for floods and land slides. Finally, environmental degradation, both local and global, is creating natural hazards in areas where there was none before. Destruction of coastal mangrove to create hotels and resorts is exposing investment to storm surges, and global warming is causing floods in locations which never experienced such events in the past.

The bottom line is that disasters don’t occur in vacuum and humanity is not a mere bystander. As made clear by the recent World Bank report “Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters”, while there are natural hazards, it is our developmental practices that are causing more disasters to occur. My TED talk on this could be very informative in this context.

JGK: If disasters are on the rise, what is the UN doing to prevent them?

MT: The United Nations is indeed very active in the area of disaster risk reduction. UN initiated the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction during 1989-99 and this was followed by the creation of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, in 1999. In 2005, the world community agreed on the Hyogo Framework for Action: Building Resilience of Communities and Nations, which is the basic document for efforts of institutions, countries and communities for disaster reduction.

It is, however, true that the disaster risk reduction activities often do not receive the same degree of publicity as disaster response or indeed disasters themselves. This is partly because while the effects of disasters are immediate and efforts of disaster management are obvious, the activities and impacts of disaster reduction are neither obvious nor photogenic. One of the best possible disaster risk reduction efforts is in achieving disaster sensitive land use planning. The hard work has to take place in national policies and local planning. The benefits happen decades and may be even centuries later. And when a disaster is avoided, it is often not even noticed or correlated to the disaster risk reduction efforts made decades earlier.

This is not to say that more is not needed to be done. Disaster risk reductions should become just a way of life for everybody, from individual to communities to nations. Disaster risk reduction actions should be mainstreamed into all aspects of life, be it in planning new highways or building new hospitals. Only when that has happened, we can safely say that we have reduced disasters as far as reasonably practicable and we are still a long way away from that goal.

JGK: As our main audience is school students, can you explain how schools should deal with the issue of disaster management?

Very good question, thank you.

There are many ways in which schools and disaster management can and should interact with one another. Firstly, and most importantly, in every major disaster schools are destroyed and depending on the time of the day school children are impacted, often in thousands. This must be prevented at all costs. Special care should be taken while constructing schools to ensure that they are built away from locations that have a high probability of being hit by a disaster (eg. Hill slopes, riverbanks, and beaches). Even when we build schools in areas in not immediate vicinity of danger, schools should be built to a higher standard of disaster sensitivity, as partly because children are our future and partly because schools are part of the critical infrastructure that will often need to double as community disaster relief efforts.

Secondly, we should ensure that safety and disaster management should be an essential part of the school curriculum. Here I want to differentiate safety from disasters because most children in most schools in India are likely to be impacted by a safety incident (such as road accident, water safety incident, fire or chemical spill in a lab) than a major natural hazard such as earthquake or hurricane. Our children should be trained to ensure that they understand risks, avoid them and are capable of responding to them should an event happen. Every school should have a school safety plan, it should be told to all students and potential scenarios should be periodically exercised.

Thirdly, school children should always be sensitive to what is happening around them in the community, be it global or local. It is customary in many countries that when a disaster happens school children collects funds to send relief materials to the impacted area. When I visited Japan after the Tsunami I came across “solidarity cards” sent by school children all over the country to the tsunami affected area. In Thailand I saw group of children playing music in a mall to collect funds for flood relief. All these activities not only assist the survivors of the disasters, but the students themselves, as they become citizens of tomorrow.

I want to add just one point here though. We need to make basic changes in our attitudes and habits too. In the past, it was common to send used clothes or other household goods for disaster relief. This stemmed from our belief that those who have lost their belongings should be happy and thankful even to receive second hand materials. But next time before you start such collection or donating your second hand goods, try to put yourself in the shoes of those who have lived normal lives like you and me and have just lost everything. Would you be happy to be walking around in t-shirt that is half torn or does not fit you well? The correct response is to give cash, that too generously, to organisations that have a track record of delivery. Injecting more cash to the disaster area help to restart local businesses, provide jobs and give dignity to the survivors of the event.

JGK: Can you give us some insight into the disaster management scene in India?

India, being a large country also with a big population, has significant exposure to natural and technological disasters. Every year, there are major disasters, leading to hundreds, sometimes thousands of deaths. Even more sadly, tens of thousands of people routinely lose their lives in accidents, such as road accidents, drowning, railroad accidents and fire incidents.

The Government of India passed the National Disaster Management Act in 2005 and has established the National Disaster Management Authority under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister. There are state and district disaster management authorities. One of the innovations India has brought about is the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), a big contingent of paramilitary forces trained in disaster response prepositions around the country with resources to rapidly respond to various kinds of disasters.

I think India can do a lot more in promoting better safety culture in the country. As I mentioned before, more people lose their life in routine safety incidents such as road accidents and drowning. Yet we do not teach swimming or other basic safety and life skills in our schools. When we make safety an integral part of our curriculum, right from schools all the way to professional degrees, then we can stem the tide of rising deaths from accidents, where India currently top the world.

JGK: Could you explain how you gained expertise in the field of disaster management and how you began working for the UN?

MT: When I was at the university, there was no course on disaster management, let alone a degree programme. In fact, being a disaster manager was not even in my horizon as such careers did not exist then, other than may be fire fighters or underwater rescue teams. But when I joined Brunei Shell Petroleum in 1995, there was an oil spill at sea and by coincidence of circumstances I ended up being the senior most person on the ground that day. This left me with no option other than assuming leadership and deal with the disaster. My initiative was recognised by the organization and I was then provided specialized training and substantial opportunity to work in corporate emergency management.

By another set of circumstances, I ended up being in places where I had opportunity to exercise my disaster management skills. I was in Brunei in 1997 when the haze episode happened which blanketed the entire South East Asia, from Singapore to Philippines in a cloud of toxic smoke from forest fires in Indonesia. I was in Oman when a blow out in an oil well in Zaulia went on for 6 weeks before being brought under control. Being part of the corporate team dealing with this emergency gave me tremendous exposure how to work under community, government and media pressure in the event of emergencies.

The opportunity to work in the United Nations came as a surprise and naturally a big privilege. I was originally recruited to follow on the monitoring and assessment of environmental damages caused by the first Gulf war. However, since then I had opportunity to deal with all major conflicts and disasters in the twenty first century, working in locations from Afghanistan, to Gaza Strip to Haiti and Balkans.

JGK: Do you have any advice for those who want to pursue a career in disaster management?

Unlike 20 years back there are many courses on disaster management and many organisations needing disaster experts. However, my advice to youngsters is not to pursue an early degree in disaster management, but instead learn about safety in whatever domain of study you wish to pursue. After obtaining your first degree and establishing in your technical domain, be it as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, paramedic, teacher or whatever, you can decide to specialize in disaster management and work locally and globally in the field of disaster manager. There are hundreds of organisations, local and global, UN and others, who need people who have domain knowledge and commitment to work in disaster management.

I must say that working at the front end of disaster management is very challenging and one should not make that decision lightly. If you specialize in disaster response, you will need to be ready to leave your post at very short notice and work in tiring and traumatic conditions for extended period of time. On the other hand if you work in the field of disaster risk reduction, you may need to work for many years with limited resources and no glory, and your efforts in averting disasters may never be recognized in your lifetime.

But all said and done, a career in disaster management is most rewarding because we are serving people who need it most, bringing hope and a message from humanity at their biggest hour of need.