At the time of writing, Peru is suffering the effects of a natural disaster of unprecedented magnitude. What is known as the coastal El Niño has brought rain, flooding and landslides of mud and rock that have so far left 90 dead, around 20 missing and more than 120,000 other direct victims, with an estimated 800,000 people affected in total. With more than 160,000 homes affected and around 1,400 schools damaged, the human and economic costs of this phenomenon have been enormous. In fact, economic losses to date have been put at more than US$ 3 billion or the equivalent of 1.6% of Peruvian GDP. To make matters worse, the coastal El Niño will have a negative impact on the growth of Peru’s economy.
This is happening at a time when Peru has in place institutional disaster risk management structures and legislation geared towards physical prevention and immediate rescue and relief or humanitarian assistance. That there is room for improvement, though, is evident from the social policy response to the disaster.
Indeed, with the country facing the challenge of reconstruction, there is an urgent need to link emergency responses to existing social protection mechanisms. It is the State’s task to undertake a reconstruction process that not only deals with infrastructure but also focuses on the lives of the people affected, particularly children. Today, children are overrepresented among the poor: while the poverty rate averages 21.7%, it is as high as 30.7% among children and adolescents aged 0 to 17. When a disaster occurs, children’s physical integrity, psychological well-being and educational attainment may be affected by infrastructure damage, lost school days or their own physical and psychological condition. It is important for reconstruction planners to remember where children spend their lives, namely in their families, communities and schools. Failure to do so will jeopardize the country’s major social achievements of recent years.
The most vulnerable have the greatest difficulty in adapting and responding to disaster. These families and their children face risks that, if unaddressed, extend beyond the disaster itself: loss of livelihoods, impaired health and nutrition, less education and lower productivity. Adapting and making maximum use of the social tools available to diagnose and address an emergency of the magnitude of the current disaster is imperative to ensure the response provided to families and communities is timely, sustainable and commensurate with the scale of the damage.
In addition to the tremendous solidarity of society as a whole and the international community, as well as the humanitarian assistance that has been mobilized, Peru is well equipped in many ways to respond, since it has fiscal resources, know-how and solid social instruments and programmes that should be fully exploited. The response must be rapid and include aspects ranging from the preparation of victim registers to provide information on those affected and a basis for organizing the multisectoral response to the adaptation of cash transfer or school meal programmes, whose coverage or benefits could be broadened to reach those affected, particularly children.
Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt after this emergency, but the main challenge is to rebuild lives. At the same time, this crisis will enable the State to strengthen its capabilities for dealing with disaster risk.