Vulnerable populations need our support with two catastrophes set to collide in the Bay of Bengal

Within 24 hours, Cyclone Amphan is set to cause death and devastation to vulnerable communities across the Bay of Bengal. Sadly, the destructive power of floods and storm surges are unleashed on regular basis in this part of the world, but this time they bring an additional danger: COVID-19.

People are likely to gather on higher ground to seek safety. Packed tightly together in flood evacuation shelters and community centers, these crowded communities and camps in Bangladesh could rapidly accelerate the spread of COVID-19.

The warning comes from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA), which is funded by the Z Zurich Foundation and counts Zurich Insurance Group among its members.

There are particular concerns for places like Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands of Rohinyga refugees have been forced to shelter in camps amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to respect physical distancing when you live shoulder to shoulder. So far at least one case of COVID-19 has been confirmed in the camps.

Calls for UN funding

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is calling for the UN’s $6.64 billion COVID appeal to be fully-funded to help countries fight the onslaught of COVID-19, but also to help build community resilience to natural hazards, such as storms that can lead to flooding.

The UN appeal is only 15 per cent funded, and according to disaster risk reduction expert Ms Afsari Begum from Practical Action, a member of the ZFRA, the funding is desperately needed.

“We will always need funding to respond to unforeseen humanitarian disasters, but there is so much we can be doing now to ensure natural hazards do not become humanitarian catastrophes,” adds Ms Begum.

According to ZFRA, floods affect more people than any other natural hazard and wrack up hundreds of billions of dollars in mainly uninsurable losses. Floods can lead to a loss of housing, water-borne, vector-borne, communicable disease outbreaks and infections, while damaging and disrupting access to critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and clinics.

In 2019 alone, 14.7 million people were displaced by floods and storms. June is the start of monsoon season in Asia, where countries regularly face increasingly damaging extreme weather events and where we can reasonably predict communities will face floods that displace hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, also a member of ZFRA, have calculated that for every $1 invested in flood resilience preventing natural hazards from becoming humanitarian disasters, we save on average $5 in future losses.

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance believes that no-one should be left behind or forgotten because of the COVID-19 global health crisis. It is absolutely vital that developing countries are given the support needed to build resilience to the virus and also to natural hazards, and that reaction to one risk should not undermine the commitments to work on other global risks like the climate crisis.