Mekong River Commission

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

6.1 Preparation of the MRC Annual Flood Report 2005 - Lessons learned

More information on response to flood events is contained in the annexes for each of the LMB countries. A summary is presented below.

• There are multiple locations of data: administrative levels such as in villages (communes), districts and provinces and technical levels such as in departments of agriculture, public works, health, etc. Additionally some NGOs may have interesting, but generally very local, data. Some of those data are consolidated at province levels (generally through the institutions in charge of disaster management including the National Red Cross agencies).
• Most of the affected provinces prepare lists presenting consolidation of damage from flood. Those lists however are not standardised, resulting in well detailed indicators in some provinces and the same indicators not monitored at all in other provinces. Units are not necessarily identical, eg some reports consider damage to roads in numbered sections and others in kilometres.
• The meaning of the terms used for describing the indicators may vary from one list to another, eg, "Number of affected people" may refer to people having been flooded for a few days with very little damage or to people who lost all their rice production. It is not always clear that "Area of rice damaged by flood" refers to a full loss of production or a decrease in yield.
• The financial estimate of damage is rarely exhaustive. Some damages are evaluated in order to obtain the budget for repairs. However, when no external fund is accessible, other than the recurrent maintenance budget, no accounting is made available. Some provinces, reported a lack of expertise for making such an assessment.
• In the available lists of damage, it is not always clearly understandable if some data are "not available" or "zero" or "little damage". Very often, only "blanks" appear on the lists. If data are missing, additions are obviously biased.
• The data are rarely centralised at a national level, and even if they are, there are doubts about the reliability of such consolidation when examining the poor coherence of the data collected locally. Experience also shows that meeting with the provinces is the only reliable way to assess the data, and, thorough discussion is needed to better understand the meaning of the data and to fill in the gaps.
• Nearly all documents are (obviously) written in the national languages and very little information is available in English.

All these factors make the consolidation of information at LMB level very problematic.