15. International efforts to deal with disasters

There are disasters, mostly natural ones, with scale beyond the ability of the country. Such disasters need the cooperation of the international community to deal with them. The earthquake in Pakistan in 2004, tsunami in 2005, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2011 are just recent examples of such disasters. One of the problems faced during such huge efforts is the duplication of some aspects of the humanitarian acts and missing of some other aspects. This leads to the foundation of the Sphere project under the care of the UN. It was launched in 1997 to develop a set of minimum standards in core areas of humanitarian assistance [69]. For better arrangements and coordination of the various organizations involved in the response, the cluster approach was developed to coordinate the efforts. Figure 11 shows the cluster approach with the organizations' responsibilities [70].

Figure 11. The cluster approach.
