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Thierry Facon Senior Water Management Officer FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. UN-ESCAP, UNDP, UN-ECLAC Concluding Workshop on Methodology to Assess Socio-economic Impacts of Natural Disasters.
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Thierry Facon Senior Water Management Officer FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific UN-ESCAP, UNDP, UN-ECLAC Concluding Workshop on Methodology to Assess Socio-economic Impacts of Natural Disasters Forests and floods: drowning in fiction or thriving on facts? The other socio-economic impacts.
A report by FAO and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)a collaborative project that also involved IWMI, the World Agroforestry Center and ICIMOD
The massive flooding this week in Central America has prompted the press and well-intentioned advocacy groups to blame the flooding following heavy rain from Hurricane Stan on excessive runoff caused by “extensive deforestation.” • This report seeks to separate fact from fiction when it comes to forests and floods: there is no scientific evidence linking large-scale flooding to deforestation. The same holds true for recent flooding in China, Thailand and Vietnam.
The report’s intention is to prompt a close examination of the many issues involved in a major flood event —and an abandonment of the myth that deforestation is the root cause. • The object of this presentation is to highlight the fact that “mitigation measures” can have socio-economic impacts affecting the designated culprits according to misguided views.
Misguided views lead to designation of culprits who become secondary victims of the natural disasters • Government decision makers, international aid groups, and the media are often quick to blame flooding on deforestation caused by small farmers and loggers. The conclusion is wrong, scientifically. • Such misguided views have in the past prompted governments to make life harder for poor farmers by driving them off their lands and away from the forests, or down the slopes into the plains, while doing nothing to prevent future flooding.
Facts and fictions • Forests can play a role in minimizing runoff that causes localized flooding. • But there is no evidence that a loss of trees significantly contributes to severe widespread flooding. • Even at the local level, the flood-reducing effects of forests are heavily dependent on soil depth and structure, and saturation levels, not exclusively on the presence of the trees.
Planting trees and protecting forests can have many environmental benefits, but preventing large scale floods is not one of them (1). • If deforestation was causing floods, you would expect a rise in major flood events paralleling the rise in deforestation. • That is not the case. The frequency of major flooding events has remained the same over the last 120 years going back to the days when lush forests were abundant. (1) on drought: forests also tend to be rather extravagant users of water, which is contradictory to earlier thinking
The sharp increase in the economic and human losses attributed to flooding is caused not by deforestation but mainly by the simple fact that more people are living, working and generating more wealth in flood plains. • Many floods that previously would have been only minor events now become major disasters.
Secondary socio-economic impacts • The practical effect of policies is to force poor farmers—who are routinely portrayed as major perpetrators of “illegal logging”— to abandon their lands. • Catastrophic floods in China, Thailand and the Philippines prompted logging bans that put millions of people out of work. • In Romania, more than 1,000 people were recently prosecuted during a government crackdown after the country was devastated by flooding.
We need to stop blaming people who live and work in and around forests for floods that affect entire river basins, and instead consider the effect of a wide variety of land-use issues, which can in some instances include poor logging techniques. • Policy makers and development agencies have responsibility to pursue solutions that are rooted in the best available science.
It is time for national and international policy makers and development agencies to acknowledge that objective scientific research does not provide easy answers when it comes to understanding flooding. • A complex interplay of natural and man-made conditions that produce major floods and exacerbate their impact. • For example, large floods always have been a natural—and beneficial—part of the ecosystem. But a range of human activities, such as draining and developing wetlands and damming and altering stream flows, can make them worse.
Policy implications • Stop chasing quick fixes for flood-related problems and promote integrated watershed and floodplain management. • An integrated approach recognises the limitations of working only in the uplands to minimise floods or only in the lowlands to reduce their damage. • Such an approach combines land-use management in the uplands with land-use planning, engineering measures, flood preparedness and emergency management in the lowlands. • Crucially, it considers the social and economic needs of communities living in both the mountainous watersheds and the river basins.
