El Nino warning for Pacific countries

New York (IPS/PINA Nius Online) – Developing countries will continue to suffer thousands of deaths and injuries and tens of billions of dollars in economic damage every two to seven years until investments are made in forecasting and preparedness for the El Nino weather phenomenon, a new study warned.

‘Lessons from the 1997-98 El Nino: Once burned, Twice Shy?, a collaboration of four United Nations organizations, stresses that more reliable El forecasts and the capability of governments to react quickly to them are critical, especially for the developing world.

Fiji and Papua New Guinea are among 16 Pacific, Latin American, African and Asian countries included in the study, which focused on the most harshly affected countries during the 1997-98 El Nino

“El Nino is not a freak occurrence – it is becoming an increasingly predictable part of the global climate system. We need to accelerate our understanding of it and be better able to deal with its devastating consequences,” said Under Secretary General Hans van Ginkel, Rector of UN University (UNU), which co-authored the report.

In the absence of such capabilities, vulnerable populations, infrastructure and economies in many parts of the world will continue to suffer from El Nino’s wrath – floods, fires, drought, cyclones and outbreaks of infectious disease – the report warns.

An El Nino (Spanish for Christ Child, due to its typical onset in December) event occurs when warm water flows eastward from the warm pool of the western tropical Pacific Ocean and there is a reduction in the upwelling of cold water in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and along the Pacific coast of the Americas.

Once initiated an El Nino event typically lasts about one year. It causes a reversal of trade winds and ocean surface currents in the eastern and central Pacific which triggers a low pressure system over parts of South America drawing heat and moisture that would otherwise be distributed in the west Pacific or elsewhere.

The creation of regional organizations to prepare collective responses to El Nino is one of the key recommendations of this 650 million dollar study developed by teams of researchers.

They worked in 16 countries: Bangladesh, China, Ecuador, Cuba, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Paraguay, Peru, and Vietnam, Costa Rica, Fiji, Kenya, Mozambique, Panama, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

Regional co-operation is especially important as ”El Nino does not respect borders on maps,” Michael Coughlan of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) emphasized in an interview with IPS.

WMO, UNU, the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), the International Strategy for Natural Disaster Reduction (ISNDR) and the US-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) collaborated on the study.

Many governments do not have the human skills and financial resources to carry out national high-tech monitoring and forecasting based on El Nino’s extreme events, the report says, as a result it becomes increasingly important for these countries to depend on research outputs from other countries in order to develop national disaster reduction strategies.

Furthermore, many of these developing countries do not have the latest research pertaining to the climate’s influence on society – the study therefore encourages trust-building measures be taken between these countries and climate related “information donors”.

Developing countries must be empowered to apply the information they get from outside sources locally, Godwin O.P. Obasi, secretary-general of WMO told reporters Friday.