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Expert Opinions & Stories
The development paradigm has shifted to ‘digital by default’ as a norm, reshaping societies and economies. As a hub for digitally driven innovations, Asia and the Pacific is well positioned to…
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…
Loss and damage @ COP 29 Baku: 4 key takeaways
In July 2024, cascading impacts of multiple landslides in Wayanad, Kerala—a state of India – have killed more than 400 people and resulted in colossal socio-economic impacts. The landslides were…
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…
Stories of growing vulnerability make regular headlines across all Asian and Pacific small island developing States (SIDS). With tens of thousands of people displaced every year due to climate and…
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…
Promoting common aspirations
As the world is still gearing up to welcome 2024, let us find a moment to reflect on some of the key trends of the past year and pursue now to embrace the path towards hope and promise for everyone,…
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…
Between 1970 and 2022, disaster events in Asia and the Pacific caused 2.04 million deaths and $2.71 trillion in economic damages. ESCAP estimates that among these totals, tsunamis rank as the third…
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…
We are living in an era of a polycrisis: the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency and the Russian invasion of Ukraine continue to send shockwaves through Asia and the…
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…
The latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes for grim reading: Every fraction of a degree of warming comes with escalated threats, from deadly heatwaves to…
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…
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,…
Multiple earthquakes, the strongest being of 7.7 magnitude, struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria on 6 February 2023. The earthquake was extremely powerful, and more deadly because it…