S

outheast Asian countries need a collective partnership to reduce risks related to disasters as they are located in one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, a seminar was told recently.

“I think the only disaster that this region does not experience so far is only snowstorms,” the Foreign Ministry’s director for ASEAN social and cultural cooperation, George Lantu, said on Tuesday.

“The rest have existed; floods, earthquakes and droughts — just name it. We have been through them all.”

He said it was good for the countries to sit together and help each other in the context of the people and the governments.

George was speaking in a seminar on public-private partnerships for disaster preparedness organized by the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance (the AHA Center).

The center’s data shows that with 354,000 deaths between 2004 and 2014 Southeast Asian countries recorded more than 50 percent of the total of 700,000 global disaster fatalities. The disasters have also led to a total economic loss of some US$91 billion.

Recently, governments around the world have increased their presence to help other countries to mitigate disasters and humanitarian crises.

Indonesian aid workers, for example, provided humanitarian assistance to Rohingya people in Myanmar earlier this year, while those from other ASEAN countries delivered aid to earthquake victims in Aceh in December 2016.

ASEAN foreign ministers signed an agreement in 2011 to create the AHA Center, which is based at the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) office in Jakarta.

The center serves as a regional hub for disaster information and assistance to ensure fast collective responses in the region. Financed by all ASEAN member states, each country is able to ask for the center’s help when a disaster or humanitarian crisis happens.

However, challenges remain for the center to carry out its role, six years after it was set up.

The AHA Center’s executive director, Adelina Kamal, said one of them was the different degrees of government openness in each country.

She said some countries would be more open while others were more bureaucratic and that it was the center’s job to mediate and become a bridge.

George said that Indonesia always manages disaster relief transparently, so it got more support from other countries.

He said ASEAN countries should be more open in certain areas to allow other countries to identify the assistance needed during a crisis.

Meanwhile, BNPB executive director Dody Riswandi said that while government had an important role to mitigate disaster, he believed that further assistance from business players was very important.

He said Indonesia was currently working to draft a permanent policy that would provide a legal framework to support public-private partnerships in the future.

Dody said the other things that could be done by the private sector included providing training to officers in the field.

“We need to engage the business players because they have a lot of resources that could be a great help,” he said.