Boost for cyclone resilient housing in Pacific

Transcript

The charity Habitat for Humanity says it plans a surge in the number of houses it builds in the next six months, in the face of more severe cyclones in the region.

Its New Zealand chief executive, Claire Szabo, says the organisation is working with the governments of Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to accelerate their building programme ahead of the next cyclone season.

She told Jamie Tahana that they hope have built 100 cyclone-resistant homes in the three countries by November.

CLAIRE SZABO: We have been doing projects in the Pacific, primarily on a responsive basis after cyclones, so I think what's particularly significant about this project is we have some low-level building activities that we do between disasters, but actually what we've managed to do this year - for the first time on anything like this scale - is get a building project planned that gets houses up prior to cyclone season. So it's a preventative action, rather than a disaster response.

JAMIE TAHANA: And these are cyclone proof houses? They won't go up to be blown down again.

CS: That's exactly right. So the design that we build to - well, there's a number of designs we use - they are tested for the kinds of weather events that happen in the Pacific. So certainly there's things like tsunamis, there's cyclones that happen every year, a lot of the places in the Pacific where we work are also subject to sea surges and flooding. So these are designs that are absolutely specifically for the environments where we are going in to.   

JT: And you are an NGO, how are you able to afford this sudden surge in construction?

CS: So there are a few really wonderful partnerships that we have managed to forge and get to this scale. Firstly with the Samoan government, they have mandated the housing authority within the Samoan government to provide small loans for families that are in our project. And so what that means is just that there's an income stream for us to actually get our projects done. Secondly, the New Zealand government, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has supported that particular Samoan project. We have a lot of volunteers that we are planning to take up who will contribute significantly to the labour. We have a brand new agreement with the government of Tonga and, again, that government has mandated their development bank to provide small loans to families to cover the cost of the building materials, and they'll be paying those back to the government on an affordable basis and then we're coming in with our volunteers and our managers and providing the labour.  

JT: Is this a one-off surge because it's been a particularly bad year or will this kind of be happening every year from now on?

CS: I think we're just seeing increasing weather events in the Pacific. They're increasing in frequency, they're increasing in severity, and both the governments in those countries, the people in those countries, New Zealanders just by virtue of seeing the media, are all learning about how bad this is and how important it is. And I think there's just a sense of urgency, certainly in our organisation, that enough's enough, we need to get ahead of these weather events.