Disaster Risk Reduction in the ASEAN region: Understanding and assessing systematic risks of floods and landslides in a river basin context

[Please refer to Page 74 in GAR2022 where this work is cited. The full paper will be online soon at the same website as GAR2022]

The rapidly changing socio-economic landscape of the Southeast Asian countries is an important driver for systemic risks such as climate change and hydro-geological disasters.  Global processes such as the SFDRR, the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encourage cross-sectoral coordination and integration of strategies to address the emerging disaster and climate change risks. A similar emphasis on integration and coordination between DRR and CCA can be found in various regional and national processes in the ASEAN.

The region has put in place far-reaching disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation plans, laws, and regulations at both regional and national levels, and progressing to localize them to sectoral and community levels. One important element that countries needed to make significant progress on is in integrating climate change projections into disaster risk assessments to help address future systemic risks.

The above needs are captured in this project and have produced guidelines for practitioners and policymakers to incorporate climate change projections into flood and landslide risk assessments based on pilot exercises carried out in Lao PDR and Myanmar. The systemic risks associated with floods and landslides were assessed using a multi-stakeholder consultation process, and community engagement at the river basin level in combination with dynamic simulation models and tools for assessing systemic risks.