Cyclone Pam

One senior business executive was at Auckland Airport on his way to the World Conference – preparing to advocate the merits of disaster resilience to his fellow executives – when news of the disaster prompted him to ditch his talking points, switch his ticket, and dash to guide his company’s recovery on the ground in Vanuatu.

Within 48 hours, instead of speaking to delegates in Sendai, the Chairman of the Board of Directors Digicel Samoa, Pepe Christian Fruean, was in Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila as part of the telecommunications company’s emergency deployment.

Six months after Cyclone Pam hit the Pacific, the bank approved the additional grant to support Tuvalu's medium-term recovery efforts.

Almost half of Tuvalu's 10,000 people were affected by the category 5 cyclone, which caused massive destruction as it passed in March, before continuing southwest to Vanuatu.

The system caused an estimated 10 million dollars worth of damages or more than 30 percent of the country's GDP.

Almost the entire Pacific region is preparing for what climate forecasters say could be one of the worst El Niño events since the late 1990s.

The aid organisation CARE Australia says in the country's south, staple food crops have failed to fully recover after the cyclone due to limited water supplies, sea water damage and dry conditions.

Its Vanuatu program manager Charlie Damon says people are starting to feel concerned about not having enough food.

Since 2012 several UN agencies have been working in 12 communities across the country in water and sanitation, capacity building and strengthening their resilience to the adverse effects of natural disasters.

This includes the establishment of community disaster councils, preparations of emergency relief supplies and the identification of safe houses, which proved invaluable during Cyclone Pam in March.

The UNDP's David Malakay says the project ended in July but the experience with Pam reinforced the need for it to continue.

The Northern Marianas College says there are 18 buildings in different phases of disrepair.

The college president, Dr Sharon Hart, says of the buildings that sustained damage, about four are inoperable, including the gym, which sustained damage to its roof and floor.

However, the College's director of external relations, Frankie Eliptico, says most of the classrooms were spared, and there's a huge effort by staff to return things to normal.

It is part of the UNDP's reconstruction programme following the devastation of 22 islands by Cyclone Pam last March.

National Coordinator of the UNDP Project, Russel Tamata says the UNDP Office is working closely with the Department of Public Works and custom chiefs of the islands to construct the buildings.

Mr Tamata says both the standard of the buildings and carpenters are provided by the Public Works while the chiefs and their people on each island provide manpower and labour to complete the buildings.

This is equivalent to some 64.1% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) report has revealed. Pam is one of the strongest cyclones ever recorded in the southwest Pacific and left a trail of destruction, displacing some 65,000 people, and damaging or destroying approximately 17,000 buildings and ruining agricultural crops across half the country.

Traditional dwellings, called "Nimafiak", are being credited with keeping the death toll relatively low during one of the Pacific's strongest ever storms -- only 11 people were killed.

The National Disaster Management Office has been conducting surveys in outer islands, and is encouraging communities to rebuild using traditional methods.

Philip Meto is part of the NDMO team, and says while communities are keen to use these methods, a lot of the vegetation used for traditional buildings has been lost.

This has left inhabitants of rural islands facing an uncertain future.

Tanna, an island 200km south of the capital Port-Vila, took a direct hit on 13 March. The wreckage is still visible: the tops of banyan trees have been lopped off, roofs ripped away and churches flattened. Trees on island were stripped by winds gusting at over 320km/h, but now fresh greenery is bursting out and people are rebuilding their homes and replanting their fields.

 As the category five cyclone approached Vanuatu, President Baldwin Lonsdale and the director of the National Disaster Management Office Shadrack Welegtabit left for Japan.

"It meant that you had someone in a very senior position that was playing a key role in coordinating the international response that didn't have the experience of the person who normally would have been in that position," Save the Children Australia's Rebecca Barber told the ABC.