Americas Quarterly: During your first year in office, flooding displaced or affected nearly 7 percent of the population. What are your short-term plans for helping the affected citizens and recovering from the predicted 2.5 percent drop in GDP that your government estimates this natural disaster will cost?

Juan Manuel Santos: First of all, I don’t think it will be a 2.5 percent drop in GDP. On the contrary, when we start reconstructing what the floods damaged in terms of infrastructure, it might have a positive effect on our growth.

Concerning the short-term plans, we are helping those people look for a place to sleep and bringing them basic services. We are also finding alternative locations for children to attend school, because many schools have been destroyed or flooded.

In the long-term, we have created a fund to finance the reconstruction of public works to adapt ourselves to this new reality of climate change, because we have to be aware—and the world should be aware—that this type of phenomena will become more frequent because climate change is irreversible. That is a major challenge for us, but we are determined to follow through, because our commitment is to make Colombia better than it was before the disaster.