Increased Allocation of Funds for Disaster Managemen
Friday, 12 June 2009 14:03
Lacking a modern legal framework and guidance from the central government, municipalities and cities in Serbia are left to create their own disaster management systems and allocate funds for disaster management within their available budgetary resources. As municipalities and cities across Serbia are under pressure to reduce excessive administrative costs and allocate more resources for higher priority projects, such as long-delayed infrastructure improvements, most municipalities and cities were forced to assemble far more restrictive budgets for 2009 than in recent past years. In light of these pressures, one would expect that funds allocated for preventative measures and timely responses to disasters, in most municipalities, would not be treated as a high priority and would have been an easy budget line item to cut. To the contrary, the Preparedness and Planning Team found that most municipalities have either maintained or increased their spending on preventative measures and / or reserve for relief and recovery assistance in relation to last year. This is a direct result of the program’s work with the municipalities in raising awareness of the importance of investing in disaster management on an ongoing basis.
The PPES program implements a training program that builds the capacity of local level stakeholders to deal more effectively with natural and manmade disasters. By October 2008, representatives of forty program municipalities had completed the program’s core training. Municipalities are encouraged through the training to create a permanent standing body in municipalities that leads disaster management efforts and a system that forces municipalities to update and create necessary documents to support disaster management systems. These activities have increased local leadership awareness that more financial resources need to be set aside from local municipal budgets for disaster prevention and response efforts.
Municipalities wise-up to costs associated with post-disasters relief
The program analyzed the approved budgets for 2008 and 2009 of municipalities that have worked with the program for at least a year and were not still on temporary financing for 2009. Out of the 36 municipalities analyzed: 23 cities and municipalities (over 60%) maintained or increased their budget for disaster management; and, 13 cities and municipalities increased their budget (nine by 15% or more and two by 80% or more). Also encouraging was the fact that per capita funding for disaster management in 2009 increased significantly amongst the smallest municipalities (those with less than 20,000, which are often municipalities with higher percentages of vulnerable populations relative to their total population), as did the largest municipalities (those with more than 100,000 citizens, which are often those with the largest numerical concentrations of vulnerable people).
The strongest validation of the program’s success in convincing municipal leadership of the value of investing in disaster management can be seen when examining budgets for disaster management in 2009 and 2008 for program certified vs. non-certified municipalities and cities. An analysis of the data indicates:
1. That certified municipalities have budgeted 30 percent more per capita than non-certified municipalities in 2009 (122 dinars vs. 94 dinars per capita), whereas the difference between the two in 2008 was insignificant (100 dinars vs. 97 dinars per capita);
2. That certified municipalities have budgeted 22 percent more per capita in 2009 for disaster management than they did in 2008 (122 dinars vs. 100 dinars per capita); and,
3. That the slight drop in disaster management funding among non-certified municipalities from 2008 to 2009 (from 97 to 94) is statistically insignificant.
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* "Certified" municipalities are ones that have been formally recognized by the program as having completed all program training and having made a number of objectively verifiable and sustainable (permanent) changes to their municipal structures and planning to enhance their disaster preparedness.