The five-day conference in the Japanese port city of Kobe has just concluded with the adoption of an action plan to make the world more resilient to calamities like the Indian Ocean tsunami in December. It wasn't easy for the participants to iron out their differences and agree on the Hyogo Framework for Action, which would serve as the guideline for disaster reduction over the next decade, as the United States was seen by many as trying to steal the show for focusing on a warning centre already set up in Hawaii. Countries like France, Germany and India had proposed various warning-system setups and each was eager to see its own proposal taken up as a model for the planned warning system.

Another point of disagreement centered on the identification of global climate change as a cause of disaster. Delegates and experts from island nations insisted that rising sea levels increased the impact of disaster like the Indian Ocean tsunami. The compromised action plan eventually spelled out the need not only for creating early warning systems, but also for devising measures to improve societies' abilities to reduce risk and cope with the disaster.

A separate declaration was also adopted on the final day, which summarised the issues raised at the conference and stated the commitment of the international community to strengthen disaster reduction measures in the light of the tsunami disaster.

For Bangladesh the conference started a day earlier, as the head of the Bangladesh delegation, Minister for Food and Disaster Management Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf, had the rare honour to be one of the two keynote speakers at the pre-conference international symposium entitled "Living with Risk: Disaster Reduction for Future Generations." The other keynote speaker being the former UNHCR chief and President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Sadako Ogata, the symposium and the panel discussion that followed the symposium turned out to be a real high profile one drawing wide media attention.

In his keynote speech, Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf focused on initiatives being taken in Bangladesh to raise the awareness of the people about the importance of preparing for a disaster. As natural calamities are inseparable parts of life of the people in a country where cyclones and floods periodically cause widespread devastation, Bangladesh faces no other choice but to be ready for nature's sudden attack. The preparedness programme initiated by the government resulted in significant decrease in casualties since the big cyclone in 1991 that claimed more than 130,000 lives. Cyclone shelters built with the funding provided by major donors and international organisations as well as establishment of a network of volunteers and relief workers to warn people of an approaching cyclone has a significant impact as there were no large casualties in Bangladesh since the 1991 cyclone. According to the minister, what the country now needs is to make people realise that depending on relief is not the solution to the problem of natural disaster. Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Programme was initiated precisely with that idea and the project is being implemented with the total amount of fund coming from country's own resources.

An interesting part of the speech was the power point display of a poor village lady, Halima Khatun, whose bamboo hut stands only a few inches higher from the ground level and thus making her home vulnerable even to a small scale flood. What Halima Khatun and plenty of others in Bangladesh are in need is not emergency relief supplies, but real help that would give them the opportunity to raise the levels of their small houses to make them less vulnerable to the approaching flood water.

The keynote speeches were followed by a symposium participated among others by Jan Egeland, Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs, and the Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The UN Under Secretary General pointed out that attention had always been given to the dramatic images of disasters, not to the preparedness to reduce the damages caused by such disasters, and hoped that the conference would help the world community to move from theoretical knowledge to action on the ground.

It was the Red Cross chief who lauded Bangladesh for making real progress in the preparedness aspect of natural disasters and called on other developing countries to follow the example of Bangladesh. The message of disaster preparedness, according to him, had been applied very effectively in Bangladesh and the local chapter of the Red Crescent Society was cooperating with the meteorological department of the government in raising the level of awareness of the people about the importance preparing for disaster. At the main conference too, the message of our modest success was echoed, as some other delegates also referred to the experiences of Bangladesh as a valuable lesson that needed careful consideration.