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Photo credit: Freepik/Rawpixel.com Blog

Drought is a slow-onset disaster that causes significant damage to the environment.  Unlike most other natural hazards, the effects of drought often accumulate slowly over an extended period…

Photo credit: WMO/Muhammad Amdad Hossain Blog

On this World Meteorological Day, WMO and ESCAP unpack the 2023 theme: Weather, Climate and Water across Generations – through a series of three opinion pieces focused on the Asia-Pacific region,…

Photo credit: iStockphoto/D.Talukdar Blog

Floods are a recurring phenomenon in Bangladesh and the adjoining state of Assam, India. The ongoing large-scale flooding here is not an exception. Floods often trigger landslides and large-scale…

Photo credit: UNDP/Hira Hashmey Blog

This year, India and Pakistan have recorded their warmest ever March and April. The pre-monsoon period in South Asia is usually marked with excessively high temperatures, especially in May but early…

Photo credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider Blog

A person in the Asia-Pacific region is four times more at risk of natural hazards than a person in Africa and sixteen times more than someone in North America or Europe. The “riskscape” of the region…

Photo credit: NASA image by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data from University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility Blog

Recent research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown that the world is likely to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming much earlier than previously anticipated. The United in…

Photo Credit: Arnie Chou Blog

As the world enters its second year of living with the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus has shifted from containing the spread of the disease towards recovering from socio-economic disruptions. COVID-19…

Photo credit: ASEAN Foundation Blog

Last month, the world marked the first anniversary since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 virus as a pandemic. Throughout the year, we witnessed how a virus can bring forth a…

iStock / metamorworks Blog

Where are we going?

Today this question is often answered with a glance at a smartphone and a whole host of behind-the-scenes geospatial and other data working to provide easy-to-understand…

Unsplash / Lynda Hinton Blog

After decades of impressive growth, for the first time, Southeast Asia is experiencing a drop in measured human development. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic will likely take months…