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Expert Opinions & Stories
Amid a sea of high-rises and blocks of concrete, taking a walk through Bangkok’s Lumphini park or New Delhi’s Sunder Nursery can give you a much-needed break to “touch the grass,” in the midst of…
Adaptation is rapidly emerging as a critical pathway to safeguard communities and ecosystems from the impacts of climate variability which creates unpredictable challenges that are hard to plan for…
Tshering Wangchuk is no stranger to the challenges of living in a rural community in the mountainous parts of Bhutan. “My place is far away from the capital city Thimphu. There is no road access. We…
The summer of 2024 has shattered heat records, starkly illustrating the harsh realities of our warming planet. In India alone, the heatwave has claimed over 100 lives and caused more than 40,000…
Scientific assessments reveal that the Third Pole (TP), encompassing the vast glaciated mountain systems of Asia, is warming at an alarming rate of over 0.3 ºC per decade, surpassing the global…
The ESCAP Asia-Pacific SDG Progress Report 2024 flagged the region’s regression on SDG 13, climate action. To reverse this trend, it is imperative that both mitigation and adaptation go hand in hand…
Unpacking 2023, the warmest year on record
2023 was the warmest year on record. The latest Copernicus Climate Change Service highlights that February 2023 to January 2024 was the first time that we experienced 12 consecutive months of…
On 12/13 November 1970, the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh. The hard lesson learnt from ‘Bhola’ was not having an effective cyclone warning…
New index reveals increasing risk in food systems across countries in Asia and the Pacific
Food system risk is increasing across most countries in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years according to the recently launched INFER Framework
INFER uses 95 indicators to produce food system…
On 4 October 2023, a cloudburst over Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim triggered a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in the Teesta river basin, which claimed over 30 lives, destroyed the 1,200 MW…
The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration was unanimously adopted during the G20 Leader’s Summit on 9-10 September 2023. It has many takeaways covering a variety of pressing global challenges, including…
The last few weeks have seen large scale floodings in southwestern China and northwestern India including its capital, Delhi. The deluge in China and India is no exception to an emerging trend…
On 14 May 2023, cyclone Mocha hit Myanmar. Accompanied by sustained winds of 180-190 km/h and violent gusts, torrential rainfall and flooding, Mocha made the landfall in a context of…
As we celebrate the World Environment Day this year, it bears repeating that the world is in the midst of an extinction crisis. Asia and the Pacific sees the most rapid and serious decline in…
The Asia-Pacific region has the world’s highest estimated number of children and youth (ages 24 or younger), counting over 1.7 billion in 2020. This represents 1.7 billion distinct lives and,…
The Asia-Pacific Riskscape: How do the changes in weather, climate and water impact our lives?
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,…
In a few days, global leaders will gather at UN headquarters in New York to make certain we recognize the value of water, appreciate its vitality to life and embrace a visionary Water Action Agenda…
Why is the environment-health nexus important for Asia and the Pacific and how to strengthen it?
As countries gathered at the United Nations’ biodiversity conference, or COP15, to agree on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, policymakers, scientists, and rights advocates reaffirmed…
The recent climate talks in Egypt have left us with a sobering reality: The window for maintaining global warming to 1.5 degrees is closing fast and what is on the table currently is insufficient to…
"The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids -- the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” stated UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently as floods submerged much…