By Jonatan A. Lassa and Margareth Sembiring

This NTS Insight attempts to create a baseline assessment of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) policies in ten Southeast Asian countries. More than 50 per cent of global disaster mortality occurred in Southeast Asia between 2004 and 2014, and four ASEAN member states are ranked in the top 10 countries most affected by climate risk between 1996 and 2015. The integration of relevant existing global mechanisms into national and local regulatory systems, and especially into national development plans, is therefore necessary to ensure the development of adaptive and resilience capacities. Although the region has realised the importance of streamlining DRR and CCA policies in development plans, a baseline of such efforts has yet to exist to date. This is the first series of the NTS Insight on a larger climate change and disaster risk study. The next NTS Insight will look into climate risks in ASEAN.

INTRODUCTION

Effective reduction of losses and risks from natural hazards and climate extremes requires integrated actions at different levels of governance. One of the greatest challenges faced by governments of developing countries today is in creating institutional convergence that integrates global goals emanating from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), Paris Agreement on Climate Change (PACC) and the World Humanitarian Summit. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) are part of key agendas being considered in all these recent global agreements.

The SFDRR lays down the guiding principles for each state to take on “the primary responsibility to prevent and reduce disaster risk, including through international, regional, sub-regional, transboundary and bilateral cooperation” through four priorities for action. The first priority action is understanding risk which encompasses data collection, risk analysis, risk baseline, regular updates of progress, capacitybuilding, promotion of investment and innovation in risk reduction and dissemination of disaster risk information. The second priority action is strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk through “mainstreaming and integrating DRR within and across sectors” at different levels, empowering local authorities, coordinating with civil societies, formulating relevant policy, and addressing risk reduction needs. The third priority action is investing in risk reduction for resilience by providing incentives and allocating necessary resources at all levels, promoting public and private mechanisms for risk transfer and insurance, and risk sharing and protection. The fourth priority action is to “enhance disaster preparedness for effective response and “to build back better” in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction”.

The SFDRR seeks to “substantially increase the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020.” It sets the following targets: to reduce global disaster mortality between 2020-2030 compared to 2005-2015 (measured by average per 100,000 reduce the number of affected people globally (measured by average per 100,000) between 2020-2030 compared to 2005-2015,1 “substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, among them health and educational facilities, including through developing their resilience by 2030” and “substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to the people by 2030”.2 While the Sendai Framework has set the grounds for DRR efforts, SDG 2030 has now emerged as new global driving force for risk reduction (See Box 1).

At a regional level, Southeast Asian countries have realised the need to address disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in an integrated manner. The Declaration on Institutionalizing the Resilience of ASEAN and its Communities and Peoples to Disasters and Climate Change issued in April 2015 acknowledged the threats posed by climate change and ensuing extreme weather events and called for the mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in overarching development agendas. Multi-sectoral collaborations collaboration in multi-level governance are key to make such integration happen. The ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management (ACDM) has been identified as the focal point for this cooperation.

The ASEAN Vision 2025 on Disaster Management adopted the SFDRR vision by encouraging ASEAN member states to develop new DRR strategies by 2020. The Vision that states that “AADMER (The Asean Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response) will need to be linked to the integration efforts under the ASEAN Economic Community” could probably credited for the first systematic attempt to integrate both DRR and CCA into wider development policy in ASEAN.3 Thus far, comprehensive baseline information on DRR and CCA policies in ASEAN is not yet available.

The overall objective of this paper is to provide a baseline of existing national and local arrangements that incorporate DRR and CCA into development policy processes. This study uses existing secondary sources including formal policy reports, and relevant grey and peer review literature.