09 December 1998

Bonn, Germany: These last two weeks, the floor below UNV in Haus Carstanjen has been deserted. Our UN Framework Convention on Climate Change colleagues are in Buenos Aires as secretariat to the 4th Conference of the Parties to the convention. Other rooms in the Bonn UN complex await new tenants in January - the staff of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Meantime, engineering work has been completed to prevent the Rhine, fifty yards away, from flooding our basement as happened in the past.

What a year for weather! Wrecked crops in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 70% of Bangladesh under water and vast areas of the People's Republic of China inundated, while drought and heat halve food production in the Russian Federation. Now Hurricane Mitch wreaks the greatest storm damage in living memory on whole countries of Central America.

As UNDP Administrator James Gustave Speth has pointed out, the poorest always suffer worst in these disasters, precisely because they are poor. Deprived rural communities and the destitute in shanty towns the world over have paid a terrible price for axing the trees from the marginal land and from the river banks on which they are obliged to squat. Just as unfairly, some of the smallest and weakest nations - say, Kiribas and the Maldives - are most in danger from heightened sea levels due to global warming.

In time of disaster volunteers do what they have to do. Like the UNV in Nicaragua who has refused to be helicoptered to safety and insists she stay on to help. Like the Programme Officer in Honduras who has diverted his entire team to emergency relief and spent up his discretionary fund on having thirty national UNVs inventory shelters and oversee food distribution.

As soon as feasible, they get back to removing the need for such gestures in the first place. To building sea defences in Fiji and Guyana, improving disaster preparedness in the Cook Islands, working on strategies to help African countries combat encroaching desert. The environment, the needs of cities, and helping peoples prevent crises and recover from them are the key thrusts of UNV's Strategy 2000. So we have the mandates, and we've proved we can recruit the committed mid-career professionals to carry them out. We need only the resources to be able to double their numbers.

Twenty to thirty times more people ask to be UNVs than the number we assign fresh in the average year. It is sad to conclude that the climate of international co-operation is not yet right, that we may never be able to accommodate them because the real money will always go on armaments and interest payments on debt. How much better it would be spent on measures to prevent 24 inches of rain wiping out the progress of 24 years in less than 24 hours.