Strengthening Fijian Resilience to Disaster

As a professional humanitarian, Yos has spent most of his career supporting disaster response and preparedness in Southeast Asia through the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre). For the past 3 years, however, Yos has been contributing his humanitarian expertise to support Fiji’s National Disaster Risk Management Office (NDRMO), deployed as a Humanitarian Training Coordinator.

At the core of his role is the development, coordination and implementation of disaster-risk management (DRM) related trainings. Every day, he’s meeting and collaborating with Fiji’s subject matter experts across different government agencies to strengthen Fiji’s disaster management systems, and to support the capacity development for the next generation of Fiji’s disaster management professionals.

‘The main goal is to help the community and the government to be more resilient in reducing disaster risk and responding to future disasters,’ said Yos.

A Paradigm shift

In 2024, Fiji approved the National Disaster Risk Management Act. This signalled a positive step forward for a whole-of-government commitment to improve Fiji’s resilience to disasters, recognising the important role everybody plays in disaster risk reduction.

‘The new Disaster Risk Management Act reflects a paradigm shift from a disaster response or reactive approach to a holistic pro-active approach to disaster risk management,’ said Yos. ‘Disaster risk management is everyone’s business, while the Act also highlights the need for capacity strengthening in disaster risk management; not only at the national level, but in the sub-national and community levels.’

For Yos, the new legislation has accelerated progress for Fiji’s ability to prepare and respond to disaster. This has included formalising the Fiji National Emergency Response Team (NERT), which he helped established in 2023. ‘So far, we have 37 people in the roster that are ready to be deployed in the country and overseas,’ said Yos. ‘The unique thing about the NERT is that Fiji is actually the second country in the Pacific who established a NERT.’

‘Based on Fiji’s NERT, I heard that some other Pacific countries that observed the NERT training had inspired them to develop their own NERT mechanism within their own country,’ said Yos. ‘This will not only strengthen their national system but also strengthen the Pacific regional system in the future as well.’

Community Disaster Resilience

The new Act has also led to a resurgence to implement community-based disaster risk management training through the establishment of Community Disaster Management Committees. These newly established committees will be trained through the 5-year ‘Community-based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) Plan’. This plan which will seek to ensure all 2,050 communities across Fiji are covered and supported with DRM training, reinforcing the existing trainings delivered to communities in the past decade.

‘The communities in Fiji are very resilient and adaptive to different situations, including disasters,’ remarks Yos. ‘However, the current risk of climate change and disasters is increasing. So, the idea is to provide a standardised training approach to support the community, so that they have the right knowledge and tools to be resilient.’

While the CDRM Plan is still in development, critical to its success is the monitoring and evaluation of the plan, which will seek to meaningfully measure and track the progress of the 2,050 communities. ‘So, we are hoping to say that – after five years – let’s say we have 50% of communities in Fiji are resilient to disaster,’ said Yos.

Learning From The Past

Looking ahead, Yos remains optimistic about the future disaster resilience of Fiji. He hopes his most lasting contribution throughout his deployment is fostering a culture of learning and co-designing.

‘We always look at “what works, what’s needed, and what are the lessons learned,”’ said Yos. ‘And although there’s a lot of disasters in Fiji, we also have a really good foundation of learning out of that, and there’s a lot of policies that have been developed to enhance the effectiveness of disaster risk management.’

‘It’s the spirit of working for people, the passion for building disaster resilience in Fiji, and hopefully the work plans, guidelines and policies we created together that will contribute to disaster resilience in Fiji.’