The Center for Disaster Preparedness develops a tool for children to participate in risk assessment and planning by Jesusa Grace J. Molina, CDP Center Coordinator

Children are among the most vulnerable groups in times of disaster. To promote children’s participation in disaster risk reduction, the Center for Disaster Preparedness (CDP) developed a toolkit called Child-Oriented Participatory Risk Assessment and Planning (COPRAP). The toolkit uses participatory and creative methods such as role playing, drawing, interactive discussion, and workshops to allow children to determine elements-at-risk; identify safe and unsafe locations; determine appropriate behaviors and responses before, during, and after a disaster; and identify other issues which threaten them. This toolkit was then tested on children aged 7-13 years old living in the flood prone area of Barangay Banaba, San Mateo, Rizal.

How it started

CDP advocates a child-oriented disaster risk reduction (DRR) approach. Through the ProVention Consortium Research Grants, CDP was able to do an action research project entitled Mobilization of Children and Youth to Offset Vulnerabilities for Empowerment or MOVE. This aimed to build the capacity of young individuals through raising awareness, enhancing skills, and encouraging values formation so that they become empowered actors in disaster risk reduction. This was carried out in a core group of children and youth between 9-17 years old who were living in a high risk flood zone in the community of Barangay Banaba, San Mateo, Rizal. This core group was then named Buklod ng Kabataan [BK] which means ”children bonded together.” They became one of the lead implementors of the research project activities. In the span of 14 months, the children and youth became attuned to vulnerability reduction and environmental protection concepts and were involved in risk reduction activities such as Participatory Risk Assessment, DRR Action Planning, and DRR Training and Advocacy.
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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Audio-CD)

by William McDonough and Michael Braungart;
with Stephen Hoye (reader)
Published by Tantor Media (2008)

McDonough and Braungart argue that the traditional recycling and eco-efficiency approach does not actually prevent ecosystem damage but merely delays it because wastes will eventually be landfilled along with the toxic substances (described as a “cradle to grave” scenario). They contend that the end of a product’s usefulness should provide nourishment for something new; thus, their design philosophy is based on the principle of “waste equals food.” It takes nature as the model (e.g. animals die and their carcasses feed fungi and microbes) for developing sustainable products and systems and “ecoeffectiveness” of materials and material flows becomes the new standard.

The authors call for a new level of eco-consciousness among product designers, architects and corporations. Their philosophy can inspire innovation in the manufacture of products and design of the built environment. They prescribe strategies that give importance to design and planning as solutions to protect the environment. But because of this focus on design as the solution, some of their envisioned scenarios may seem too good to be true. Nevertheless, the book provides hopeful vision especially for product designers and architects to create things that are not just “less bad” but that are 100% recyclable, toxin-free, and therefore positively good for the environment.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Edited by Elizabeth Royte
Published by Little, Brown and Company (2005)

Elizabeth Royte, a journalist who lives in New York City, tracked down where the solid and liquid wastes generated in her household go. She started by carefully quantifying the things that end up in their trash and this investigation leads her on a garbage route leading to the landfill. Along the way she encounters sanitation workers and men and women in facilities where wastes are diverted from the landfill – composting farm, paper recycling center, scrap metal yard, (hazardous) metals reclamation center, electronic waste transfer station, plastic recycling plant, and sewage treatment plant.

The book is an enlightening look at the propensity of people to discard because of upwardly mobile lifestyles, the continuously growing waste stream, technological fixes, and how the waste that we generate can circle back to bite us (i.e. groundwater contamination, air pollution, high toxicity levels of farm produce). The author’s exploration into her own trash trail is interesting.
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A Belgian architect works with informal settlers in Pasay in dreaming up their future home

by Tracey Loontjens

“It wasn’t always easy: we needed to let go of our European way of thinking to create architecture, and to consider and understand a completely different way of living, different circumstances and traditions.”

Tracey makes the model for the low-cost housing project

As part of my studies in urban planning, which I combine with a postgraduate program about North-South issues, international relations and development cooperation, I decided to come to the Philippines and do an internship at TAO-Pilipinas. The Philippines is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world. As an architect and future urban planner, I wanted to learn more about the characteristics of Philippine cities and villages, about their history and present, and about their actual problems by examining the specific cultural, political, economic, and social context of urban forms of this country and to compare this with other cities or regions.

I had certain ideas and expectations about my stay and work here before I left. But, although I had travelled already before in Asia and prepared myself well by doing research about the country, I knew it quite well only in theory and could only guess how it would be to live and work here. I didn’t know what the urban poor communities would look like, how the people would be, what stories we were going to hear, or in what way the culture would influence me. But in the past few months those words and images came alive. It became my world and I became every day a bit more part of it.

So far, it has already exceeded every imaginable expectation, and I’m still getting surprised every day.

I come from Belgium, a small European country with only 10 million inhabitants – a quantity which generally equals the population of an average, medium size city in Asia. So living in a megacity such as Metro Manila is quite overwhelming. Although we (because I’m here together with Brecht, my partner, who is also volunteering at TAO-Pilipinas) experienced Manila at first as a bleak, overpopulated, and polluted concrete urban jungle, we discovered every few days new things, learned to read the complex urban tissue and appreciated its cityscape, given color by the Filipino people and their daily habits.

TAO-Pilipinas played an important role in this. During our stay here, we were confronted with homeless people and visited poor communities in informal settlements. But we couldn’t help but notice also the luxury of the high-end,  sometimes gated communities, the high-rise buildings, and the shopping malls. It’s not always easy to comprehend this enormous gap, but our work at the NGO helped us to understand the development of this megacity, as well as the living conditions of its inhabitants.

From the beginning, we were involved in a lot of different projects of the NGO and had the opportunity to combine the work at the office with field trips or community and project visits. Through these visits, we realized that being poor is not necessarily an obstacle to creating a well organized and functioning community and that people with a limited income are not only often much more socially active, but also more creative than most others, in how they use space for example. We learned that you do not necessarily need to have an incredibly complex design to provide new housing areas for former slum dwellers, but that simple interventions can also improve the housing environment, and the general quality of life in that area – remarkably.
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