The wildfires engulfing the Los Angeles area could reshape what Southern California will look like for years to come. Within a week, approx 30,000 acres of land burned, thousands were forced from their homes, and at least 24 people They lost their lives till Tuesday morning.
After such a major disaster, one of the most common questions people ask is how to help. Ordinary people are extraordinarily generous in their response to tragedy. About half of Americans reported donating to Hurricane Katrina relief and nearly three-quarters gave to post-9/11 charities. People still donate generously after disasters abroad when they hear about them — despite the media coverage something Much more comprehensive than tragedy others.
But turning this generosity into results for people affected by disasters is surprisingly challenging. Private donors generally can’t do much to speed up search and rescue efforts. (And people are trying Be a rescuer yourself can only increase the number of people at risk.) In the event of hurricanes and typhoons, roads and airports are often flooded, making it difficult to get supplies to where they are needed.
Another complication is that generous responses to disasters can bring in an extraordinary flood of money compared to the typical budgets of most local charities. Most charities have a small budget and are used to working within it. They might benefit from 20 percent more money, or even double that, but if it’s hundreds of times their normal operating budget, they often don’t know how to direct it to those who need it most. Waste and corruption A serious concern in disaster relief operations, which has been spectacularly highlighted by The infamous fake 9/11 charity.
For all these reasons, disaster relief, especially in the immediate aftermath of a disaster like the Los Angeles fires, can be difficult to do effectively. Those who donate in these circumstances may be disappointed to find that their donation has not been particularly effective. And because of that track record, donors and charities most effectively concerned with helping people in need often don’t target disaster relief, instead choosing to donate to areas with no immediate disaster and less complexity and uncertainty. It is almost always more cost-effective to do so.
But these issues of disaster relief need not lead to paralysis. For potential donors, effective donations in response to disasters Look at potential charities where your money can do the best work.
Donors are not affected Instant response. They can affect long-term recovery.
When thinking about disaster relief, we can think about a A few different aspects Disaster recovery, each with their own challenges. Relief work is immediate disaster response — search and rescue, supply drops, emergency medicine, Firefighting relief operations are usually hampered by logistical constraints, not lack of funding. In a severe disaster, roads and airports can be closed, and victims are often panicked and disorganized.
It is very important to find out how to solve these problems and provide support in such situations. These are not problems caused by shortages of money or supplies, and the generosity of donors cannot solve them.
When a disaster strikes, it is too late to improve search-and-rescue capabilities or immediate disaster response. Investments to improve these capabilities need to be made before a crisis—not when one is already occurring.
In the case of such a large earthquake, casualties can also result from secondary emergencies – deaths in the weeks and months following the disaster due to lack of access to medical care, supplies and necessities, especially given the fact that so many of the victims were Already living in refugee camps. Deaths in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria were an example of a secondary emergency — 64 people died in the early stages of the disaster and thousands more Help was slow to arrive and died.
Donors are more helpful with another aspect of disaster response: recovery. Died after a fire or As water recedes, people will need medical care, food and supplies to rebuild their homes and lives. There are still complicated logistics involved in disaster recovery, but it’s a place to look if you want to make a difference with your money.
More money usually helps — but not always
Charities have expressed concern for years about sending physical supplies — shoes, clothes and food — to people in disaster-stricken areas, unaware that these supplies can displace more urgent and better-targeted aid shipments and often go to waste. They typically ask the public to donate cash and allow the nonprofit to purchase needed supplies.
But while it’s intuitive that charities may not always need your old shoes, it’s less intuitive that they may not need your money. The fact is that sometimes an agency has all the donations it knows what to do with, and the remaining barriers to effective relief are staff time, expertise, access to affected areas, or limited supplies. Experts call it “room for more funding”. If a charity has room for more funding Giving them more money will allow them to do more than what they are doing.
Charities will rarely turn down donations, but that doesn’t mean they always actively seek donations. And if a charity is actively seeking donations despite not knowing what to do with them, that’s a bad sign. Charities with room for more funding are more likely to be specific about how the money will be spent – for example, “we will build houses” or “we will compensate victims” – and ideally will specify their fundraising goals for each of their programs.
Donations are needed when no one else gives
Disaster relief tends to occur in sudden peaks. Donations happen almost as soon as a disaster strikes and die quickly as the news cycle moves on to other things. Eighty percent of donations occur within the first few days of a disaster.
Ideally, charities would then stockpile the money donated and spend as needed while rebuilding and restoring the area in the months and years that follow. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, and it’s not uncommon for the need to be greater six months or a year after the disaster—when the rest of the world has moved on—than immediately afterward.
People making their donation decisions so quickly can have serious consequences. Often, this means major disasters are ignored if they are not reported quickly enough. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was truly one of the worst disasters in recent history, with an estimated death 160,000 peopleAnd it got a good deal of US coverage. $13 billion was raised in aid, most of it in the first days of the disaster.
But two years ago, at least 138,000 people died due to this in Bangladesh and Myanmar Cyclone Nargis. Only $300 million was raised, almost entirely from the government. Thanks in advance Reluctance of Myanmar’s authoritarian government to allow aidAs well as concerns that the government was using the money to cement its grip on power, the tragedy missed its first week of donations. As the country reluctantly agreed to some foreign aid, the disaster began to slip from the news. Many Americans never knew it and still don’t.
All of this brings up an important concept that charitable donors should be more aware of: neglect. If a disaster occurs during a busy news cycle, or in a country with few foreign journalists, or if it is a disaster where the death toll is immediate and slow and difficult to measure rather than catastrophic, people may not be paying enough attention. . These are usually places where money is really needed.
Another thought: It’s a good instinct to pay during a disaster. But one thing for a donor to consider is setting money aside and then following up with the charity a few months later to ask what they’re doing on the ground and whether they need more funding.
In an area without much clarity, charities have to be very responsible
Disaster relief is one area where there is a lot of uncertainty about what works. In an uncertain environment, it is particularly important that charities are transparent about what they are doing and open to the possibility that they make mistakes.
A charity should be able to explain what programs they are in a position to offer, how much money they need to fully fund those programs, and what they will do with the extra money once they have fully funded their programs. Charity evaluators like GiveWell, which try to identify the most promising programs, have found this especially so Clarity of their rewards is hard to come by It comes to disaster relief.
Often, the more urgent and complex the situation, the less clear and transparent charities feel Unfortunately, that’s when transparency is most needed so we can build a better picture of what works for future disasters.
Even better would be a charity that targets effectiveness, collects data on what they’re doing, and scales (or cancels) their programs accordingly. This is challenging in the case of disasters, as no two are the same and it is difficult to know whether past success truly predicts the future.
Nevertheless, there are good examples of adopting a transparent, honest and results-driven approach to disaster relief. There is GiveWell Doctors Without Borders says “A leader in transparency, honesty and integrity in relief organizations” and was a major reason for recommending Doctors Without Borders as a disaster relief organization.
Because we still don’t know much about the best ways to provide effective support after a disaster, there’s a lot of room for experimentation. Here too, it is important for charities to do things right Trials should ideally be announced in advance, have a clear mission statement and report on how the trial went.
Several years ago, Give directlyA charity that transfers cash to the world’s poorest people has done a good job of undertaking disaster relief with a focus on results. The agency was curious about whether cash transfers — literally giving cash to people who have just been hit by a disaster — worked well for disaster relief. There’s reason to think so—a cash-transfer program has extremely low overhead, can happen even when roads and airports are damaged or full of high-maintenance aid, and significantly improves outcomes for the world’s poorest.
But there’s also some reason for skepticism — maybe paying people in disasters is just bidding up scarce supplies. GiveDirectly conducted this through a small-scale trial offering cash transfers to Hurricane Harvey victims. It wanted to test whether its cash-transfer-based approach worked everywhere, not just in poor areas of Kenya where it had traditionally operated, and whether it was as effective for disaster relief as aid efforts targeting poverty.
In an updateGiveDirectly reported that it could successfully get cash to about 90 percent of the target population who were mostly able to use it, which makes straightforward cash aid look like a promising intervention for disasters in rich countries, although different problems would be expected in poorer ones (notably, both crumbling infrastructure This makes it difficult for the affected population to get cash and use the money to buy any supplies they may need.) Last year, donate directly. Emergency funds have been sent After Hurricanes Ian and Fiona to nearly 5,000 low-income families in Florida and Puerto Rico, Using AI-scanned satellite images To quickly identify the areas most affected by the storm.
We need more experiments like this. People are extraordinarily generous and willing to donate millions in disaster relief when they can. Right now, there isn’t a clear picture of how to consistently turn that generosity into good results. But careful experimentation is a very valuable step toward figuring it out.
Update, January 14, 2025, 4:15 pm ET: This story, originally published in 2018, has been updated to reflect news of the Los Angeles fires.
