BALANGA CITY, Bataan – “What we want to do is not to prepare for the disaster, but to prevent it. And we can do that by certain decisions early on together.”
This was the statement of National Resiliency Council (NRC) President Antonia Y. Loyzaga in an interview during the last session of Resiliency Preparedness Leadership Workshop on Wednesday at The Plaza Hotel, this City.
According to Loyzaga, the idea of NRC is not to prepare for the disaster that is going to happen, but to prepare so it does not happen.
“You don’t prepare to respond in terms of relief…. but the idea is to minimize or decrease the need for that relief because you have already strengthened yourself. In other words when the hazard arrives, you will not be experiencing a catastrophic impact,” said Loyzaga.
Further, she explained how a disaster becomes a disaster.
“The idea is a disaster will not be a disaster if you are not exposed, and if you are not vulnerable. If you are exposed, but you are not vulnerable, it will not be a disaster. If you are exposed, and you are vulnerable, it would become a disaster. So disaster is a hazard, exposure, and vulnerability,” she explained.
NRC is a public-private partnership which aims to address the complexity of disaster risk and the needs of resilience in the country.
The said leadership workshop administered by the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office is a three-year program which has three phases (prepare, adapt, and transform) that will be tackled one-by-one per year. The Province of Bataan is lucky enough to be the first recipient of this kind of workshop from NRC.
Meanwhile, the council strives to have the Local Government Units (LGU’s) particularly Bataan and other LGU partners baseline its capacities as well as LGU’s vulnerabilities through a cork-card system which underscores governance column and the four pillars namely: Human Development Systems, Sustainable Local Economy, Infrastructure Buildings and Households, and Environmental Pillar, which are all interconnected.
The three-day workshop held on March 12-14 was only the Prepare Phase, and Loyzaga looks forward to continuing the two other modules on the succeeding years until Bataeños can finally be declared resilient through preparation, adaptation, and transformation.
