The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes that natural disasters can be an impediment to realizing the development goals. Earthquakes, landslides, floods, and droughts have detrimental impacts on overall country macroeconomic factors and further disproportionately affect the poor and marginalized groups. Therefore, it is imperative to develop multi-hazard assessments that address and map both physical and social vulnerabilities.
South-East Asia has long experienced severe droughts. However, this second edition of Ready for the Dry Years reveals that the severity of two drought events during 2015-2016 and 2018-2020 exceed anything recorded in the past two decades, since the major El Niño of 1997-1998. Evidence presented in the Report shows that this could be set to continue as the climate warms. There is a direct association between high temperatures and droughts in South-East Asia, and multiple climate models project that the region will experience higher temperatures for all emission scenarios.
Protecting the most vulnerable to cascading risks from climate extremes and the COVID-19 in South Asia
South Asia is at a crossroad of the cascading risks emanating from the rapid spread of the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) and climate extremes in monsoon months. Every year, people in the subregion suffer from various climate hazards such as floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and heat waves. This is likely to continue this year in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When crises converge: Responding to natural disasters in South Asia during Covid-19
At present, South Asia is among the sub-regions where the spread of COVID-19 transmission is peaking. The intersection of the pandemic with the climate emergencies has created challenges that sub-region has not dealt with before and could magnify the negative impacts in some countries. Implementation of response strategies and pre-emptive actions that factor into the current pandemic are needed to protect the vulnerable community exposed to extreme climate events from becoming new epicentres of the pandemic.
In South Asia, against a backdrop of existing critical socioeconomic vulnerabilities, the deluge of weather events starting from cyclones, to floods to the related outbreaks of water/vector-borne diseases demonstrate how disaster impacts cascade and converge and threaten the very chains that hold economic and social systems together. South Asian countries have always been highly vulnerable to natural disasters. But for the first time in living memory, these natural disasters have hit amid a global pandemic.
The intersection of COVID-19 and extreme climate events reminds us once again the shared vulnerabilities of South Asia and urgency of sub-regional actions to address the crisis of cascading disasters that are impacting SDG progress in the sub-region. In the context of addressing cascading risks and bringing together multiple stakeholders under one discussion platform, UNESCAP with National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM), India, SAARC TB and HIV/AIDS Centre (STAC), and BIMSTEC Centre for Weather and Climate Centre (BCWC), engaged in an expert webinar series.
Impact-based forecasting signals an evolution from “what the weather will be” to “what the weather will do” and thus bridges the gaps between national weather services and the end users such as disaster risk management and development sector communities. It is a user-friendly way of communicating the climate risk information to support risk-informed and strategic decision-making for enhanced preparedness and in-season policy interventions.
The Ready for the Dry Years publication series has been a part of joint efforts between ESCAP and ASEAN to support Member States to prepare for intensifying drought risk, by assessing patterns of drought hazard exposure and vulnerability, highlighting drought impacts, and assessing future drought risks in the decades ahead. The second edition of the Report was launched at the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Disaster Management, which was held virtually on 27th November 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that biological and natural hazards intersect with each other and increase the complexity of overall disaster impacts on populations and economies. But disaster management and risk analytics have been slow to capture the intersections of natural and biological hazards or capture the dimensions of interconnectedness and cascading effects to the social, economic, and environmental ecosystems.