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

This contributing paper presents the results of a project implemented to assess the systemic risks of floods and landslides in selected river basins by integrating climate change projections into risk assessments. It follows a recent study on the status of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) integration in institutional and policy framework in ASEAN, identifying, flood and landslide as two most common disasters in the ASEAN region. Institutions in Southeast Asian countries are putting in place overarching disaster risk reduction plans and policies from national to local level; and rapidly progressing towards localizing them to specific sectors with robust implementation at the community level. This paper also outlines the guidelines developed for practitioners and decision-makers to understand systemic risks and address systemic risks through planning processes. Developing forward-looking risk assessments equipped decision-makers with the ability to manage rapidly changing risk profiles because of climate change and related uncertainties.

The study finds that countries still need to make progress in integrating climate change projections into disaster risk assessments to help address future systemic risks. To reduce flood risk, flood hazard and risk should be analyzed as a first step. It is important to prioritize target river basins, to formulate reasonable flood control plans and to invest for flood risk reduction. Similarly, landslide risk assessment is a process-oriented intervention and has to be carried out first, in order to prioritize the mitigation measures. There remains large areas where flood and landslide hazard risk has not yet been assessed in the ASEAN countries. Obstacles in this endeavor include limited data availability, lack of technical capacities, budget limitation.