Washington D.C. – Following natural disasters, the first response plays a crucial role when it comes to saving lives. Many more lives would be saved if a triage process could already be integrated at an earlier stage and applied to housing.
An article on The World Bank’s website says that in the developing world, it is mainly housing that kills people, not disasters. The resilience of cities is currently being discussed on many different levels, but the one clear solution is more resilient housing. The triage strategy for housing risk reduction should involve a two-step process. First, housing that is uninhabitable must be declared as such and the residents resettled. Second, it is essential that housing repair measures are identified to then make them more resilient to natural disasters.
However, triage alone will not make housing more resilient, so retrofitting must also be affordable and subsidised. Microfinance could be a way to support this process. The safe living conditions that this creates would only be the beginning. Over time, the productive neighbourhoods that evolve would drive economic growth in the world’s cities.
