CENTRAL ASIA: Regional meeting to raise disaster awareness

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ANKARA, 1 Dec 2004 (IRIN) - A regional conference on disaster preparedness in Central Asia is under way in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, aimed at finding ways to mitigate the risks and ensuring regional cooperation.

"The aim of the meeting is to ensure political commitment from the Central Asian states on priority tasks with regard to reducing natural disaster risks in the region," Sirojiddin Mulloev, an emergency ministry spokesman, told IRIN from Dushanbe, on Wednesday.

All the regional countries - including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - are prone to various emergencies caused by natural hazards, Mulloev added.

The Central Asian region is prone to various natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, floods, avalanches and drought, with Tajikistan being the most vulnerable. In 2003, in Tajikistan alone, 120 incidents of flooding, avalanches and landslides were recorded as well as 12 significant earthquakes, according to the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO).

Natural disasters have killed about 2,500 people and affected some 5.5 million (almost 10 percent of the total population) in Central Asia over the past decade, ECHO said.
The two-day event, due to finish on Thursday, is organised by the Tajik emergency ministry and the UN International Strategy on Disaster Reduction (ISDR) supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The ISDR aims at building disaster resilient communities by promoting increased awareness of the importance of disaster reduction as an integral component of sustainable development. The goal is to reduce human, social, economic and environmental losses due to natural hazards and related technological and environmental disasters.

Regional cooperation is key in disaster preparedness, observers say. "Sometimes there occur such natural disasters like earthquakes that are not confined to the territory of one state and affects more than one country in the region. The region is very interconnected with high seismic activity and there may be earthquakes measuring up to 9 on the Richter scale," the Tajik emergency official warned.

For example, if a major earthquake were to happen in the east of Tajikistan close to Sarez Lake it would affect millions of people throughout the whole region, a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

Lake Sarez was created in 1911 when an enormous landslide caused by an earthquake in the Pamir Mountain range of Tajikistan blocked the Murgab river valley. The river soon formed a lake approximately 60 km in length, containing close to 17 cu km of water. The natural dam which retains the lake, named 'Usoi', is located at an altitude of 3,200 metres. With a height of over 550 metres, it is the tallest dam, natural or man-made, in the world.

"Reports suggested that, should a strong earthquake occur in the vicinity of the lake, the dangerous right bank, a partially collapsed body of earth and rock with a mass of roughly 3 cu km, might fall into the lake," the report said.

"There was speculation that this event would generate an enormous wave which would overtop the natural dam and possibly wash it away. Impact projections suggested that the flood could affect roughly 5 million people living along the Bartang, Panj and Amu-Darya rivers, a path traversing Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan," the report added.

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