
The tragedy caused by COVID-19 is immediate, real, and unfolding before our eyes, in Nepal as across the globe. At Practical Action our resilience work is almost exclusively focused on supporting people and communities facing climate change and natural hazards. The pandemic is teaching us new lessons about biological hazards, while encouraging us to adapt our work and reflect on the ways our ingenious approach to resilience building can be applied in this new reality.
A year ago, landslides, floods, and high winds from two successive cyclones – Cyclone Idai and Cyclone Kenneth – devastated communities across Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. The cyclones left millions of people in dire need of immediate humanitarian aid and longer-term support to reduce existing risk, protect lives, and build livelihoods. During the preparations for our latest post-event review, I listened to a radio program that called the devastation by Idai and Kenneth the “forgotten disaster”.
Over the past several months we have seen the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe. However, this spread has not been uniform. Countries that are behind in the disease transmission timeline and have yet to see a surge in cases have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of communities that have been impacted early. Risk communication lessons can be used to support preparation, both for the surge of the disease and critically, the multi-hazard scenarios we’ll face as the pandemic increasingly overlaps with flood, hurricane, tornado, and wildfire seasons.
On March 25th, the United Nations released an urgent appeal for USD 2 billion in humanitarian assistance for developing countries facing horrific challenges in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Fully funding this humanitarian appeal will save countless lives, but given the depth of the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing many of these countries, we still need to think creatively about leveraging these funds to build resilience to multiple crises.
The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing huge frailties in global employment systems, not least the precarious nature of business. Charities are being hit particularly hard by loss of income and fundraising opportunities, so how should Foundations respond? In this blog David Nash, Senior Flood Resilience Alliance Manager, shares what the Z Zurich Foundation is doing to support their partners.
By any measure, 2020 has been a shocker for humanity. In this blog Practical Action's Colin McQuistan reflects on the challenges we've faced, and those we need to gear up to tackle as we app...
Back to the future: planning for long term impacts part one. This is the first in a series of four blogs about long term impacts of Practical Action’s work where we ask: what can we lea...
Back to the future: planning for long term impacts part two. In this second of four blogs on lasting changes, we discuss durability factors based on completed Disaster Risk Reduction proj...
Back to the future: planning for long term impacts part three. In this third of four blogs on lasting changes, we discuss what we can do now to better embed “long term” thinking in ou...