10 March 2016: The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has published a report that calls for urgent action to tackle increasing urban disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. The report, titled ‘Disasters in Asia and the Pacific: 2015 Year in Review,’ warns that the region’s cities, with their growing population, depleted ecological buffers and outdated urban infrastructure, may not be equipped to tackle urban disasters.

The report notes that the Asia-Pacific region, and South Asia in particular, was the world’s most disaster-prone region in 2015, with over half the world’s 344 disasters, some 16,000 deaths and economic damages costing over US$45 billion.

It highlights, inter alia: significant impacts of disasters in urban areas; devastation of transboundary river basin floods; severe cross-border disaster impacts; widespread drought; countless deaths from heatwaves; and significant economic costs of forest fires and haze.

The report uses the December 2015 floods in Chennai, India, as an example of challenges faced by many big cities, such as damaged infrastructure, disrupted power networks and waterlogged roads. It calls for: shifting the urban governance paradigm from a response-recovery approach to a risk-sensitive development approach; rethinking how drought is managed; strengthening regional cooperation for managing transboundary disasters; and capitalizing on emerging technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, while establishing regulatory standards for their use.

The report also emphasizes, inter alia: cross-border assistance and learning; end-to-end multi-hazard early warning systems; and political leadership. The report is part of a series, developed by ESCAP, that provides annual overviews of natural disasters in the region and their impacts. [ESCAP Press Release] [Report Website] [Publication: Disasters in Asia and the Pacific: 2015 Year in Review]