Hasta La Ideas

In Part 1 we discussed the various organizations that take part in international disaster response, including the United Nations and the Red Cross. In this post, we’ll look at disaster response vs humanitarian aid, as well as the challenges that disaster response faces on the global stage.

Distinguishing Disaster Response From Humanitarian Aid

By their very nature, the timelines for providing disaster assistance versus delivering humanitarian aid are quite different. Disasters themselves are usually over within a matter of hours, while the bulk of the aftermath is over within a number of days. Humanitarian crises, however, are often the result of a prolonged series of events that cross some sort of threshold definition and are thus thrust onto the world stage. The difference, succinctly put, is short-term suffering as opposed to long-term suffering. However, as we have seen in Haiti, New Orleans and any number of locales, disasters are often degenerate into full-blown humanitarian crises.

The resources necessary to respond to one or the other are also quite different. For instance, the Urban Search and Rescue Task Force groups of the United States’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are self-reliant for up to 72 hours, the normal lifespan of a disaster. During the lifespan of a humanitarian crisis, the Task Force would soon discover itself without enough resources for the length of the event. Thus, it is important to accurately define the nature of the crisis before sending resources for response and relief, lest the rescuers find themselves in need of rescuing.

Challenges for the Future of International Disaster Response

1. A Real Unified Response

When an international disaster occurs, the responders consist of urban search and rescue (USAR) teams, disaster medical assistance teams (DMATs), transportation crews, and logistics coordinators from all levels of local, government, international and non-governmental organizations. What is often overlooked, though, is that “the burden of dealing with a disaster is never felt more intensely than at the community level.” It is absolutely paramount that external responders can effectively interface with residents and government officials in the disaster area. This often means that local capacity must be developed and trained ahead of time in order to ease interaction in an emergency setting. In the United States, where protocols like the Incident Command System (ICS) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS) exist, cooperation is significantly smoother. On the international scale, however, language and political barriers make such cooperation and coordination more difficult.

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