Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has pro­posed a National Dis­aster Man­age­ment Coun­cil to be the coun­try’s highest body on dis­aster man­age­ment and risk reduc­tion.

The Deputy Prime Min­is­ter said that dur­ing any crisis, all inform­a­tion must come from a veri­fied source to ensure proper coordin­a­tion.

“For instance, in coordin­at­ing inform­a­tion, there should only be one spokes­per­son or source. Or else there will be con­flict­ing inform­a­tion. We are not ask­ing to con­sol­id­ate more power but to coordin­ate everything.

“That is why I would like to pro­pose the form­a­tion of the coun­cil as the highest body respons­ible for coordin­at­ing dis­aster man­age­ment and risk reduc­tion,” he said in a New Year address to the National Dis­aster Man­age­ment Agency (Nadma) per­son­nel here yes­ter­day.

To imple­ment the pro­posal, he dir­ec­ted Nadma to pre­pare a Cab­inet paper within one month. “You need to dis­trib­ute it to the respect­ive min­is­tries and min­is­ters to get their feed­back before I table it in the Cab­inet,” he said.

Ahmad Zahid also wanted Nadma to set a new bench­mark in national dis­aster man­age­ment for man­aging the ongo­ing north­east mon­soon.

“In my view, early pre­par­a­tions ini­ti­ated through the Cent­ral Dis­aster Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee (JPBP) meet­ing, fol­lowed by con­sist­ent coordin­a­tion at the field level, have proven that cross-min­is­terial, depart­mental, agency and state gov­ern­ment cooper­a­tion is import­ant,” he said, adding that this had reduced delays, min­im­ised con­fu­sion and accel­er­ated response dur­ing crit­ical situ­ations.

He cited the Ban­tuan Wang Ihsan via elec­tronic fund trans­fer method as another game changer in dis­aster man­age­ment, with funds dis­trib­uted dir­ectly to vic­tims.

Ahmad Zahid said this was made pos­sible through a cross-func­tional approach with Bank Sim­panan Nas­ional, sup­por­ted by a digital sys­tem via the MYIBJKM applic­a­tion developed by the Wel­fare Depart­ment.

“This approach has sig­ni­fic­antly trans­formed vic­tims’ exper­i­ence, from a pro­cess that pre­vi­ously required a wait­ing period of between three and six months. Pay­ment is made while the flood vic­tims are still in the tem­por­ary evac­u­ation centres,” he said.

Ahmad Zahid also out­lined three stra­tegic dir­ec­tions for strength­en­ing dis­aster man­age­ment – sci­ence- and data-driven pre­pared­ness; rapid and dis­cip­lined coordin­a­tion; and com­pas­sion­ate, people-centred human­it­arian action – to guide Nadma towards greater resi­li­ence and pub­lic trust.

“Dis­aster man­age­ment must move bey­ond insti­tu­tional reli­ance by lever­aging big data, pre­dict­ive ana­lyt­ics and integ­rated weather, geo­spa­tial and social risk inform­a­tion, strength­en­ing smart early warn­ing sys­tems, and adopt­ing anti­cip­at­ory action so responses occur before dis­asters strike rather than after dam­age hap­pens,” he said.