 It's my pleasure to welcome Bonnie Mayewald, who works at the Centre as the Manager of Disaster Management, but you're on circumvent from AusAid, and you were part of a panel here at the conference on civil and military co-ordination in disasters, and you focused in on lesson learning from the 2010 Pakistani floods. Could you just remind us first of all what happened in 2010 with the floods? What was the, what was happening and the impact on the people and the challenges it set? Yes, so in Pakistan in 2010 they had one of the world's largest ever disasters, and the equivalent of Australia's whole population went underwater. So 21 million people were affected. The whole Indus River Valley flooded more widespread flood than they'd ever experienced, so provinces like Punjab and Sindh, where they hadn't previously had major flooding to deal with, had a huge flood in the face of, you know, huge populations, 200,000 pregnant women about to give birth, and that, you know, where's the dry land to do it, that sort of thing. Are you a person in your career who's been able to go out into the field? Can you give us a sense of your work history? Yes. I've actually lived through or worked in about 10 disasters, so they range from Australian floods through to the Bogenville post-conflict scenario. I was there as a civilian peace monitor, again on secondment for a Mosaic, so I was privileged to work with the people of Bogenville through the ceasefire and used to investigate ceasefire infringements. When a gun or a bomb popped off, I had to go and find out why and who was upset and where the weapons were and what was the problem and how we could settle it. So you're very much genuine field experience, so in your paper at this conference talking about the 2010 Pakistan floods, you're probing lessons. What are the two or three key themes and questions you're exploring? So I use the Pakistan floods to identify a process that the civil military centre can use. We work in the space where civil and military actors work together, so it's a higher level field than where just one agency is working. It's where we go in joint action and the civil military centre was established to in fact deliver more effective coordinated responses to overseas crises. So it's really important for us to up the ante on how well coordinated we are and in the Pakistan floods there were some really good high level lessons about what we can do better and how we might do it better. So I identified a process that would be used by the civil military centre in our thinking now on gathering lessons at that interagency level, above single agency action. Now the ordinary person, here's the word process and they just go, oh it's an instant nod off you know and yet I guess something I've learned sitting at this conference is process is everything when you've got civil and military together. Yep, so I actually described it as a dance. I said I was going to teach everybody there how to dance together because civil and military have to actually walk in step a little bit better and so it was a six step quick step dance. Anybody leading? Uh no, no a civilian lead, it will always be a civilian lead but not necessarily the one agency from one disaster to the next it may be a different lead. And why always a civilian lead? Global guidelines advise that in disaster response the host nation first of all the host nation the affected country and their priorities are the most important thing and they should be leading coordination and any foreign assistance needs to be done under the leadership of a civilian agency. That must be immensely hard to do in practice. No, no the military know that it's not their core business but that they can assist very promptly and very well and that support role is an important adjunct it's not their core business but it's an important thing they can do in addition to the security field that they work in normally. Well this whole conference is about learning lessons so what are a couple of the key lessons you feel we can learn from those floods in Pakistan in 2010? Well one of the biggest lessons was about in fact identifying the priority needs of the people that were affected and as I said before you know a couple of hundred thousand women about to give birth so in that instance Australia funded the delivery of birthing kits to help with those emergency space deliveries so that those children had a better chance of surviving. And what's that kit? They are like a small kit that gives them something safe and sterile to deliver on and to cut the embolicus with and yeah to ensure that the baby doesn't get to headness. So what's the lesson we take away from that that is about an intense focus on the needs of the humans? It's actually a little bit more than that. We know that humans are affected in every disaster but the kind of impacts are actually very gendered and it all depends who you are what age you are what group you live and work in how you're impacted so some particularly vulnerable groups will have less of a chance of surviving a big disaster. Perhaps women who've never learned how to swim have no chance of surviving a tsunami. Older people don't survive well if they don't have assistance to flee quickly. So that sort of thing we found in the last decade where we've looked at the gendered impacts of disasters that there are very many more women old and young dying from these big disasters. Your best chance of surviving in Burma when Cyclone Nargis hit was being a middle aged man. And I'm assuming and tell me if I'm wrong to make any assumptions but I'm assuming that when we talk about women there's children clinging to their legs and their elderly mum or dad just over here. Exactly in fact it has been found in one of the recent big disasters that where men died they died alone where women died they died holding on to a group of children as you just said. So for quite emotional hearing that but here in this conference there are all these people called operational planners I think that's what they're called and logistics people and so. So how do you translate those very human lessons into their work so that more women and children and old people survive the next big flood in Pakistan? Yeah okay a couple of things one is that the better we can coordinate what we do the less impact we're going to have in terms of a negative impact and the more positive impact we will have in delivering assistance and the other thing we can do is making sure that what we're taking is relevant to the particular groups that are most impacted so knowing the context and listening to the priorities by being identified by the affected communities and the the affected state so we really do need to communicate and coordinate well and in fact 80 percent of what we do is about that kind of logistical coordination and communication if we get that big four out of five of our effort right then the really good positive impacts follow. Bonnie you and I are a bit older. Yeah and one of the things when you get a bit older is you think how do we make sure the next couple of generations down hold on to the lessons that we've learned this must be the passion of our generation and why I say that is you've focused on the needs of the elderly and I've already interviewed for this center series of interviews on the conference a wing commander from New Zealand and when that earthquake happened over in New Zealand one of the challenges I had there was getting the elderly people into the airplanes finding them toilets keeping them hydrated handing them over at the end of the flight to someone who could help an old person was actually they weren't ready for it so lessons get lost how do we get the lessons and keep the lessons for the next five to ten years. It's not just an age-based learning I think in every organization there's a degree of change over in staff and you actually have to do a regular process of sharing knowledge and sharing experience and sharing the learning through action through exercises through training so we very much encourage younger graduates to come to the center we've had two graduates this year showing to them the kind of things we're doing we also encourage work across the agencies who are involved in joint responses and we do regular training and regular exercises so that we catch people as they move from job to job it's not just an age-based thing so joint exercises is that something that happens in the civil military preparation for disaster in fact you could say it's been flavor of the month this year so a lot of the large military exercises this year have actually chosen a theme on humanitarian assistance in disaster relief operations and this year we've been very busy taking part in those representing the views of civilian that is non-military agencies in a military exercise to help them to shape what the military does in line with the advice they're going to receive in a real disaster response that is going to be civilian led our time is up but is there something I should have asked you that I haven't one last thing you'd like to say um no it's just that everybody is affected by disaster it's not an unusual and in Australia most Australians either themselves or have family members affected by disasters and globally it's something we're going to experience more and more and countries in our region Vanuatu and Tonga the two most disaster risk countries um my daughter was born in Tonga and we went through Cyclone Isaac in Tonga a major Cyclone and I saw how the Tongan families lifted themselves up and rebuilt locally from local um equipment and tools um it's part of life and we need to understand it and share the learning share the love thank you so much Bonnie may well thank you right here thanks Julie