Thursday, March 25, 2010

Resettlement a challenge for typhoon survivors in Philippines

MANILA (AlertNet) - On a sunny Sunday morning a group of people were hard at work in a village south of the Philippines’ capital, heaving bags of sand and digging away at a plot of land, their excitement palpable.

In two weeks, 26 families that have lost almost everything in typhoons which tore across the Southeast Asian country last year, will no longer be homeless. With materials donated by the local Red Cross and land leased for 10 years, they will soon have a roof over their heads in Pila.

An average displaced family in this area consists of seven people, so the one-bedroom houses being built will be a bit of a squeeze. But few are complaining about the space or location of their new homes after spending the last six months living with relatives or camped out in the village hall.

“Most of us are fishermen. We used to live near Laguna de Bay lake,” an elderly man said. “The new place is about a kilometre from the lake but it’s OK.”

Resettlement following a natural disaster is always a slow process, but aid agencies say scarce funding and a lack of suitable resettlement sites are added challenges in densely-populated Philippines of 92 million.

A series of typhoons—starting with Ketsana, which dumped a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours in September—killed more than 900 people and made 1.7 million homeless last year.

More than 9 million people were affected in some way by the storms which destroyed and damaged their homes, or swept away their means of making a living.

As of early March, 53 evacuation centres still house over 24,000 people. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more have been living with relatives with no new homes in sight.

LAND IS THE KEY ISSUE

“The main limiting issue is land. Land is just not available,” said Joe Curry, country representative for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) which has been providing cash vouchers to families to buy building materials.

“People don’t have security of land titles and are living in very vulnerable areas. It’s an urban problem—this is a densely-populated city where a very significant population is very poor and lives in slum dwellings,” he told AlertNet.

More than 11 million people live in Manila and its surrounding areas. Of that number, over half a million live in slums on low-lying floodplains, precarious slopes, exposed riverbanks, within highly toxic zones and other areas unfit for settlement, according to Habitat for Humanity, a charity which provides housing to poor communities.

Many of the homes destroyed by typhoons were located in areas that have since been declared hazardous, such as the shoreline along Laguna de Bay, which means evacuees cannot return.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said relocation of people to safer sites is dependant upon suitable land being made available, either by government or other sources.

However, most land in and around Manila is privately owned and most landlords are unwilling to donate their land, even though it might lying unused, analysts said.

SHELTER NEEDS

Even when there is available land it is often further from the city and away from people’s livelihoods, aid workers said. The government, they said, had initiated schemes to encourage survivors from other provinces who have been living in Manila slums to go home but success has been limited.

A government official, who did not want to be named, said the land issue was a “serious concern” impeding recovery efforts, adding that: “There is not much we can do, but we cannot allow the survivors back in the shanties.”

Aid agencies said some residents have nevertheless rebuilt houses in the slums or continued to live along banks and shorelines, mainly due to livelihood concerns.

The closure of evacuation centres, which throws “the evacuees into any available plot”, has not helped, Paula Brennan, Oxfam Philippines’ Ketsana Response Manager said.

She cited government figures at the end of February which showed 34,198 houses were totally destroyed and 151,561 partially damaged.

“Clearly, there are many un-met needs in responding to shelter needs,” Brennan said. “And it seems that people are just pressured to return to unsafe areas as they are pressured out of remaining ECs (evacuation centres).”

Others said funding for reconstruction has been limited, compounded by the fact that many emergencies were going on elsewhere.

For example, the IFRC’s appeal for 16.3 million Swiss francs ($15.35 million) has been less than half-funded. The aid organisation has be able to provide transitional shelters for only 1,900 households out of the 6,500 targeted and shelter repair kits for 4,000 households out of the 10,000 targeted.

In the long term scientists are predicting more intense and more frequent storms as a result of climate change, which suggests that resettlement will continue to be a challenge for the archipelago, which already sees around 20 typhoons a year.

“In a lot of the disasters, there’s a big focus on building back better but I don’t think the disaster here caught the attention or have the resources necessary to do that,” CRS’ Curry said.

“And that’s a big worry—if there’s another major flood in the Manila area, the same people would be affected.”

Written by: Thin Lei Win