Tonga to share Cyclone Ian experiences with SIDS

Transcript

Tonga's Meteorological Service says it will share what it learned from January's Cyclone Ian with other Pacific nations at the Small Islands Developing States conference in Apia next week.

The category-five cyclone killed one person, injured 14 others and displaced 5,000 people.

As part of the "Small Islands, Weather Together" campaign, small island developing states are looking for ways to work together to deal with an increase in extreme weather events.

The Tonga met service director, Ofa Fa'anunu, told Mary Baines better monitoring equipment is needed across the region, as well as longer term projects with donor partners.

OFA FA'ANUNU: The capacity to respond is not quite there. The capital costs of monitoring the weather and climate is very high, beyond the financial capability of small islands. I am talking here about being able to maintain basic weather monitoring equipment, networks, facilities, as well as not being able to access hired technology solutions so that we are able to provide more reliable and accurate forecasts for example. Things like radars for tropical cyclones and flood monitoring are not available, tsunamis are becoming an issue for us, equipment for detecting early warning are just not there. That is our biggest challenge, being able to monitor what's actually happening. Meteorological services need to be upgraded to be able to provide better application services to things like fisheries, agricultural, tourism.

MARY BAINES: So what would you like to see done at SIDS? What kind of partnerships or solutions do you think could come out of the conference?

OF: Regional and international approaches are needed to come up with a better solution on how to improve monitoring. The Tonga government has recently looked into some institutional strengthening. The government has formed a new Ministry of Environment and Communications to bring together related departments. One of the biggest challenges that we have in the small islands states is communication when we are dealing with early warning systems. At SIDS we hope to talk about things like improving the partnerships, to start to look at longer lasting partnerships. Projects seem to be run for three to four years and then finishes. We look around for another opportunity to start all over again. We will share our experience with tropical cyclone Ian that visited us in January. We thought we did very well when responding. It was the first ever time that the government of Tonga has actually issued a state of emergency before the impact of a cyclone. We were able to do that six hours before. But when we visited the island of Ha'apai at the end of this event it became clear that people did not evacuate their dwellings until either the eye of the cyclone had passed or until their house had collapsed. That is a very alarming sign for us.

MB: So you'll be sharing what you learned from Cyclone Ian?

OF: Yes, from pre disaster to recovery. I think there are some lessons to be learned there, especially around early warning and working together is key for saving lives and property.