Urban Poverty in the Wake of Environmental Disaster

Rehabilitation, Resilience and Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda)

Maria Ela Atienza, Pauline Eadie, May Tan-Mullins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138629998
• eBook ISBN: 9781351808491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the best strategies for poverty alleviation in post-disaster urban environments, and the conditions necessary for the success and scaling up of these strategies. Using the case study of Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in the Philippines, the strongest typhoon ever to make landfall, the book aims to draw out policy recommendations relevant for other middle- and lower-income countries facing similar urban environmental challenges.

Humans are increasingly living in densely populated and highly vulnerable areas, often coastal. This increased density of human settlements leads to increased material damage and high death tolls, and this vulnerability is often exacerbated by climate change. This book focuses on urban population risk, vulnerability to disasters, resilience to environmental shocks, and adaptation in relation to paths in and out of poverty.

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, including primary survey data from victims and those charged with overseeing the relief effort in the Philippines, Urban Poverty in the Wake of Environmental Disaster has significant implications for disaster risk reduction as it relates to the urban poor and is highly recommended for scholars and practitioners of development studies, environment studies, and disaster relief and risk reduction.

1 Introduction

On 8 November 2013, super-typhoon Yolanda (international name Haiyan) hit the Visayas region of the Philippines. We refer to the storm as Yolanda throughout this book. Yolanda was the moniker given to Haiyan when it entered the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) in the Northwest Pacific. As we were working in the Philippines, it made sense to use the name that the Filipinos used. Official figures show that 6,293 individuals were reported dead, 1,061 missing and 28,689 were injured,¹ vast areas of agricultural land were devastated and urban areas suffered significant damage including the total destruction of public facilities such as churches, schools and hospitals and private homes, as a result of Yolanda. The typhoon affected 591 municipalities and the total damage was estimated at US$12.9 billion (National Economic and Development Authority 2013, p. 5). Around four million people were displaced by the disaster and the total number of people affected in terms of their livelihood, environmental and food security was approximately 16 million.

This book, which focuses on the Typhoon Yolanda relief and recovery efforts, is the result of a three-year ESRC/DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research funded project that ran from 2015 to 2018.² The authors of this book are from the University of Nottingham, UK, the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China, and the University of the Philippines, Diliman. We embarked upon this project because we have a long-standing interest in the Philippines and human well-being, particularly under conditions of urban poverty. It was therefore a natural progression for us to investigate the impact of, and response to, Typhoon Yolanda, the worst hydro-meteorological disaster that the Philippines has ever experienced. We collaborated closely with stakeholders in Yolanda-hit areas and were assisted in our data gathering by a team of academics and undergraduate students from the University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College, many of whom were Yolanda survivors themselves.

The overarching aim of this book is to identify the strategies that work in relation to poverty alleviation in post-disaster urban environments and the conditions necessary for the success and scaling up of these strategies. Our work aims to identify why post-disaster poverty relief strategies succeed or fail and under what circumstances. We examine the Typhoon Yolanda relief efforts in the broader history of urban disasters in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. We examine examples of good, and not so good, practices in order to identify lessons learned that can inform future disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM). This is a social as well as a material investigation and our findings are situated within processes of governance, cultural norms and economic development and inequality in the Philippines. We focus on urban population risk, vulnerability to disasters and what resilience means for the urban poor.

We examine both the immediate aftermath and the longer-term recovery of the city of Tacloban and the adjacent municipalities of Palo and Tanauan in the province of Leyte, located in Eastern Visayas otherwise known as Region VIII in the Visayas region of the Philippines (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Map of Leyte, the Philippines

Source: Google Maps

We chose to investigate these particular areas, as Tacloban was the urban area that suffered the most significant damage from the storm. It was also the air and sea gateway through which relief agencies and the media came to the disaster-affected area. Palo and Tanauan suffered a similar degree of damage but operate under separate local government administrations. Large areas of all three localities sit on the coastline, and these areas suffered a great deal as a result of Yolanda. All three areas are designated Local Government Units (LGUs) that enjoy a degree of devolved administrative power under the 1991 Local Government Code of the Philippines. It was therefore useful to investigate three similarly affected areas to see how the local government reacted to the challenges of the relief effort and negotiated their relationship with relief agencies and the national government of the Philippines.

Over a four-year period, we conducted surveys and focus group discussions (FGDs) in Yolanda-hit areas and interviewed a number of survivors and representations from local government. Although the project did not start officially until 2015, we were able to conduct an initial scoping visit in 2014, nine months after the disaster. We also gathered information from international aid agencies, local non-governmental organisations and members of the business community and security services. Many of the interviews with key personnel and survivors were conducted on a repeat basis in order to build a picture of the recovery over time as it moved from the relief to recovery phase.

The following section begins with an explanation of urban vulnerability to natural hazards across Southeast Asia. This section outlines how social and economic processes have impacted on the urban poor to make them the most at risk from natural hazards. The next section introduces the international and domestic politics that influenced how the Typhoon Yolanda relief efforts played out over time. In short, disasters are political, and disaster relief practitioners must successfully negotiate the socio-economic reality of disasters if their efforts are to be socially and materially sustainable. The final section of this introductory chapter outlines the structure of the book.

Urban vulnerability to natural hazards

The impact of natural hazards is exacerbated by human activity and the organisation of human settlements. Urban vulnerability to environmental hazards is a key concern for the Philippines. Sitting on the Pacific Ring of Fire and the Northwest Pacific typhoon belt, Metro Manila³ and other Philippine cities regularly feature on lists of cities most at risk from cyclones,⁴ floods and earthquakes (Swiss Re 2014). Groundwater extraction in cities such as Manila and Jakarta has resulted in these cities sinking at the same time that they are rapidly growing (Siringan 2012; Ismail 2016), rendering them extremely vulnerable to flooding and storm surges (Brecht et al. 2012).

Around the world, humans are increasingly living in densely populated and highly vulnerable areas. Consequently, they are at greater risk from natural hazards, especially in flood-prone and/or seismically active areas, such as the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia. The material damage and death toll from disasters are therefore heightened, not because the environmental magnitude of disasters is necessarily greater, but because of the increased density of human settlements in environmentally fragile areas. This is especially true in Southeast Asia where rapid industrialisation has been accompanied by urban development and the growth of mega-cities such as Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia and Bangkok in Thailand. Other countries such as Bangladesh, Laos, Myanmar, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tuvalu, all of which experience semi-regular, climate-related natural hazards, have smaller but rapidly growing urban centres.

The greatest loss of life, as the result of natural hazards, in recent times has been the result of the seismically generated Indian Ocean tsunami that saw a death toll of 220,000 followed by the Haiti earthquake in 2010 with a toll of 159,000 (Statista 2018). However, climate change is also an increasing threat to life as typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes are now more frequent and more intense (Webster et al. 2005; Wei et al. 2015; Tagaki and Esteban 2016). Cyclone Nargis in 2008 in Myanmar generated a storm surge that reached 25 miles inland across the Irrawaddy delta, killing 140,000 people (Statista 2018). Meanwhile the Philippines is hit by around 20 typhoons a year. Typhoon Yolanda was the strongest typhoon ever to make landfall, but flooding is a regular, rather than an exceptional, event in the Philippines.

The United Nations (UN) defines disasters as ‘a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope with its own resources’ (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction 2009, p. 9). While Wisner et al. argue that disasters are products ‘of social, political and economic environments [as distinct from the natural environment], because of the way these structure the lives of different groups of people’ (2004, p. 4). In other words, natural hazards turn into disasters because of poverty caused by discriminatory social organisation and economic inequality. Such poverty is often generated by exclusion from or a discriminatory relationship with processes of development.

Exposure of the poor to environmental hazards applies to both slow onset disasters, such as desertification, and rapid onset disasters, and is seen writ large in cities. The urban poor tend to be the most vulnerable to disaster as they are likely to live in fragile housing in vulnerable localities with no security of tenure. Very often this housing is near or even over coastlines and waterways that are used as open sewers. Nevertheless urban risk is constantly evolving as cities grow and adapt, meaning that ‘the nature of disaster risk is constantly being redefined as changes to urban landscapes and socio-economic characteristics unfold’ (Pelling 2007, p. 7).

Often in Southeast Asia the urban poor live in sub-standard housing otherwise known as slums. Slums typically consist of housing that is flimsy, overcrowded, without access to safe water and sanitation, and lacks security of tenure. Such houses are typically seen in a warren of overcrowded alleys and may even be multi-storey as a means to maximise space. Nevertheless there are degrees of poverty within slums. Land is so expensive in cities like Manila and Jakarta that even salaried workers live in areas classified as slums in order to be relatively close to their place of work. There are social hierarchies in slums, like everywhere else. Even slum dwellers can have an education, enjoy regular work, receive remittances from family workers overseas and own houses.

But the prohibitive cost of land in the city dictates that the poor are consigned to the margins of urban life and forced to live in areas that are vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. At the other end of the slum spectrum, people may be homeless and forced to find shelter where they can, such as under bridges or walkways.

Rapid urbanisation is also seen in regional cities across Southeast Asia, such as Tacloban, the epicentre of the Typhoon Relief efforts (Figure 1.2). The population of Tacloban grew from 170,000 in 2000 to 242,000 in 2015, according to census records (Philippine Statistics Authority 2016), with Tanauan and Palo also experiencing similar growth rates. Therefore, the physical and social processes of urban growth, including the exposure of the urban poor to environmental risk, seen in mega cities are also played out regionally.

Figure 1.2 Land near Recto in Manila in the process of being cleared for a high-rise development

Photo credit: Pauline Eadie.

The politics of disaster

Tacloban’s relationship with the national government is of particular note because of long-running tensions between the local ruling Romualdez/Marcos family and the opposing Luzon-based Aquinos/Cojuangcos clan. The presidential term of Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III lasted from 2010–2016. Thus, he was in office when Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines and for the first three years of the recovery effort. Then Mayor of Tacloban, Alfred Romualdez is the nephew of former first lady, Imelda Marcos (Ellison 1988), wife of the former president Ferdinand Marcos (Hamilton-Paterson 1998). The Marcos family is widely believed to be behind the assassination of Noynoy’s father, Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino Jr. (Maramba 1984) in 1983. President Aquino’s mother, Corazon ‘Cory’ Cojuangco-Aquino, assumed the presidency in 1986, when the peaceful EDSA ‘Revolution’ (Buss 1987; Simons 1987) ousted the Marcoses from power. These family tensions played into the politics of the relief effort in Tacloban. However, the local political leaders in Tanauan and Palo were allies of the president and seemed to have worked well with national government agencies in the relief and recovery activities.

At the international level, Typhoon Yolanda coincided with heightened territorial tensions over oil- and gas-rich islands in the South China Sea (Dutton 2011) and ongoing concerns over terrorist activity in Southeast Asia (Abuza 2003; Ressa 2003; 2013). The Philippines is a former colony of the United States, which wrested power over the archipelago from the Spanish at the end of the nineteenth century. The strategic importance of the Philippines, as a gateway to the Pacific and maritime Southeast Asia and its proximity to the South China Sea and mainland Southeast Asia, guarantee it the status of valued ally. US forces were among the first to reach the devastated region and over time the US relief effort was highly visible, through the ‘From the American People’ branding of USAID. Meanwhile China was tardy in its response to the disaster and was commonly cited as giving less aid than IKEA, $2 million as opposed to the $2.7 million donated by the furniture store (Associated Press 2013).

Politics matters in disaster relief and recovery at the local, national and international levels. Governmental and non-governmental agencies that fail to take account of political power and the concomitant context-specific social hierarchies risk using disaster strategies that will be resisted, refused, manipulated and corrupted. Well-meaning but clumsy top-down interventions that fail to appreciate the institutional and cultural operation of local hierarchies can do more harm than good. Meanwhile donor states are inevitably mindful of their own interests as well as those of disaster-struck and developmentally challenged nations (Eadie 2016).

Local TV journalist Jeff Manibay, who lost both his parents to Yolanda, told us that the Yolanda relief efforts in Tacloban and the surrounding area were a useful ‘laboratory’ for disaster relief practitioners. This is because there was no backdrop of violent conflict in the typhoon-hit area...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Poverty, vulnerability and risk
• 3. The Philippines: poverty, urbanisation and disasters
• 4. The roles of foreign and international agencies in disaster risk reduction and management
• 5. The role of national and local governments in disaster risk reduction and response
• 6. An act of humanity or mercenary? Global and local politics of aid in the context of Typhoon Yolanda
• 7. Rebuilding communities through social capital, trust and networks
• 8. Conclusion
• Index