 Let's get more now on our top story, Super Typhoon Haiyan, last hour the storm made landfall in the eastern Philippines and it has all the makings of a major disaster, torrential rain and winds of more than 300 kilometers per hour. We've never seen one this strong and it affects such a vulnerable area and a coastline which is defenseless. It's a scene that seems to be happening more often these days. Disaster strikes victims flee. The government asks for assistance and international organizations step in to help. We didn't expect the scale of damage. Conrad Navidad is the chem coordinator and manager for the International Organization for Migration or the IOM. In November of 2013 he arrived in the Philippine city of Tacloban the day after it was devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan. He was working with the IOM's rapid needs assessment team. It was just shocking. I've been through a number of emergencies and typhoons but it was just overwhelming. The whole city was wiped out. I would understand why a lot of experts came in. It was traumatic but then you were moved to do something. To do something. It's a basic human response to seeing tragedy before others. How can we help? We ask. It's a straightforward question but with no easy answers. What if, for example, rebuilding homes in a safe location means moving people away from their jobs? Or how do you get aid to areas outside of government control? Or how do you keep resources for rebuilding and long term solutions when new emergencies are moving donor dollars elsewhere? Today on our program we're talking about the tough stuff, humanitarian dilemmas. Brought to you by the IOM we'll examine the challenges of international emergency response and the search for solutions. Today in Tacloban life is slowly returning to normal. Flights come in and out of the airport and traffic brushes through the streets. The city moves to the steady background beat of the sounds of Reconstruction. It's a dramatic contrast to 10 months ago, immediately after Typhoon Haiyan cut a path of destruction across the islands of Leyte. In Tacloban communication was cut off, roads were impassable, more than 6,300 people were killed and 1.1 million homes were damaged or destroyed. IOM staff were some of the first on the ground after Haiyan. The local government was communicating to the office of the president using IOM satellite phones. Staff began conducting needs assessments. Beyond that though, the organization had little in the way of concrete aid to offer victims in those critical first days. Rex Allenban, the IOM's senior operations officer in the Philippines explains. So we ended up sending people to those affected populations with not much to carry with them except their own words. Talk with authorities, talk with people, conduct assessments. It took a while, maybe 8 days before we could start distributing a few things. The big bulk of our procurement which happened after the incident only arrived after 3 to 4 weeks and for an organization as big as IOM, it's too late. The need for pre-positioning is an important lesson for the IOM from the Haiyan response, having money, basic aid supplies and staff available to set in motion immediately after a disaster. It can be difficult to convince donors to put money into something long term, but Marco Boasso, the IOM's chief of mission in the Philippines, thinks there's a solution. The interesting thing is to tell the donors, look, the supplies that we are going to get from you. The pre-positioning is not going to be endless, it's not, these goods are not going to stay in our warehouses for months and months. No, we are placing them in places that has high rotation of these things. We are going to use them. We are going to be in the Philippines where the next iPhone is going to come here in a couple of months or in a couple of weeks and we will be using them. We can show donors that this pre-positioning is relevant and has a mean and change lives and save lives. I think this is very important and it's one of the things that IOM is addressing. At least in the Philippines, the IOM is now working on putting together an emergency response fund. But even if aid is available to distribute immediately after a disaster strikes, another major challenge is coordination. In a car on the way to visit an IOM project in Tacloban, I asked three IOM staff members which organizations were working in Tacloban. Conrad Navidad explains that the presence of so many organizations makes coordination time consuming and challenging. Sometimes we also have that kind of feeling that we're dragging things instead of doing things fast because of this a lot of coordination activity. Sometimes it drags the implementation. It can also be difficult for the host government. The problem was the government was so intimidated by the surge of experts that they said it was just too much. They felt like they knew nothing. And in fact, you know, this government is very capable. It was a very serious feedback from the government that next time when you bring in experts, try also to acknowledge, to recognize that we have capacity. Working with local governments also presents challenges for humanitarian organizations. The finishing touches are being put on 86 homes at the Tagboro Transitional Shelter Site, about a 20 minute drive away from Tacloban. Lawrence Wood, the IOM Shelter Officer in Tacloban, gives me the details. We're using cluster guidelines, severe guidelines to make the best house that we possibly can. As I said, it's 21 meters squared, it's for a family of seven, and the developments well supported by 48 latrines. Almost 10 months after the typhoon, 86 displaced families are about to move in to sturdy new transitional homes here. Back in Tacloban, though, there are still thousands of people living in tents or temporary collective shelters. Providing shelter is perhaps the most important part of emergency response. But in the Philippines, it's also the most difficult. Here's the IOM's Rex Alamban. Looking for durable solution, you are confronted, again, with principle of private property, which is very strong here. This is a country that never went through a socialist phase. There's property rights, but then there's also human rights of IDPs. In Tacloban, in Zamboonga, in Bohol, after each emergency, a lack of available land to rebuild on means finding permanent shelter solutions takes an unusually long time. Compounding the challenge is that in some areas, like Tacloban, the government has established no-build zones, places that were hard hit by disaster and have been deemed unsafe to rebuild on. But in decreasing their exposure to extreme weather by moving IDPs away from the coast, typhoon victims face a new kind of vulnerability, economic, because they're also moved away from their jobs. In the longer term, the IOM and other organizations are advocating for local governments to set aside land in case of displacement, a practice called land banking. Rex Alamban explains that the IOM is also reaching out to private landowners and searching for more durable solutions. Our way is straightforward, identify who the landowners are in that area, approach them, offer them our alternatives, and I think we are getting faster results in getting land for finding solutions to displacements than the institutional approaches. I think we need to develop this, I think we can have accumulation of experiences and perhaps make a policy out of it and be a contribution to the whole humanitarian community. In this era of migration crises, humanitarian action accounts for an increasing portion of IOM's activities. This podcast is part of a pilot program in which we're introducing the humanitarian policy development work currently underway at the IOM. The next issue will be focusing on how the principles can be operationalized to guide emergency response. Highlights will feed into discussions at the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit. For the IOM, I'm Lindsay McKenzie.