While the recent floods are an act of nature, Albania needs to do much more to protect itself from this and other types of natural calamities.
TIRANA TIMES EDITORIAL
The floods are back with a vengeance this year, placing much of southern Albania under water. Thankfully, no loss of life has been reported. But the loss in terms of livelihood and homes is enormous nonetheless.
Unlike previous years, when northwestern Albania has dominated the headlines for floods, this year the major damage has hit the country’s southwestern regions hardest. That part of the country is not as accustomed to this type of flooding and has been caught unprepared.
Part of the story comes from climate change and the mere force of nature that nonstop rain can be. However, in Albania’s case human factors are to blame as well. In post-communist Albania’s absence of regulations, lack of enforcement and massive demographic movements, people built homes and businesses on flood-prone areas. Anti-flooding infrastructure built under communism went into disrepair or was destroyed on purpose. And the construction boom of post-communist period was fed through raw materials dug right out of river beds, which further hurt their natural ability to better channel floods. As a result, floods today tend to do much more damage than they did 30 years ago.
In addition to being a human story, the floods are also an economic disaster. The economic repercussions will be immense. Albania is a mountainous country, and unfortunately most people live downstream where the flooding happened. The flooded areas were also valuable agricultural and pastoral land and the full calculation of the financial damages will only be known weeks from now. One thing is for certain judging by the type of damage we are seeing, experts say that the entire economic growth of the country could be dragged down this year, as it did when regional neighbors like Serbia and Bosnia suffered heavy flooding last year.
Authorities should do a careful inventory of economic and infrastructure losses and apply for EU assistance to deal with the damage, the same way Serbia applied for and received aid after its catastrophic flooding last year.
There are two bills to pay related to the floods this week – the immediate bill of paying for the emergency situation and there is the long-term bill to cover the damages to infrastructure as well as people’s homes.
The government has promised to pay for damages, but often such compensation programs don’t fully work for those who are supposed to benefit, and a government that already has a high public debt might not be able to cope with the expense. Thus better systems — including flood and other disaster insurance — need to be developed to deal with these natural disasters.
As the floods continue, there also needs to be more solidarity bringing Albanians together to help the flood victims and the emergency workers who are operating in the flood-affected areas.
Politics should also take a back seat to the disaster. It’s best that in national emergencies like flooding cooperation should supplant political discussion. It is short-sighted to do otherwise.
What the politicians and experts should do now is focus on now to come up with medium and long-term plans to change the human-made element of the flood damage, and then act on these plans. Experts are already calling for entire villages to be moved, for example, because they were constructed in flood-prone areas.
At the end of the day, while the recent floods are clearly an act of nature that might have not been prevented even in a more prepared state, Albania needs to do much more to protect itself from this and other types of natural calamities.
