Expert Opinions & Stories

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…

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…

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…

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…

Asia and the Pacific is the most digitally divided region of the world, and South-East Asia is the most divided subregion. The Covid-19 pandemic detonated a “digital big bang” that spurred people,…

The Asia-Pacific region is at a crossroads today – to further breakdown or breakthrough to a greener, better, safer future.

Since the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP…

Over the past two decades, the Asia-Pacific region has made remarkable progress in managing disaster risk. But countries can never let down their guard. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its epicentre now…

From May 12-19, in the midst of the devastating second wave of the pandemic, the powerful Cyclone Tauktae struck India’s west coast and killed more than 100 people. This was the deadliest cyclone in…

In recent weeks, India’s second COVID-19 wave has been devastating, reaching world records for the total numbers of cases and deaths and overwhelming the healthcare system. On 8 May, India, for the…

In 2020, Asia-Pacific saw the collision of climate extremes and COVID-19 transmission create cascading disasters with wide-ranging impacts on sectors, economies, and populations.

The year…

Science Technology and Innovation (STI) has been at the forefront of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. From enhancing our understanding of virus transmission pathways and the complexity of…

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…

Asif Ali (name changed) and his wife live with three children in a rural township bordering India and Bangladesh. Asif lost his job as a mechanic when the COVID-19 lockdown forced the closure of a…

COVID-19 challenges the very fabric of human possibilities, survival and needs while amplifying the impacts of any ongoing crisis, especially the one faced currently by South Asia. Against a backdrop…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented changes to the way we lead our lives and our reliance on ICT connectivity has grown even faster than before. However, the region is also one of the…

The last few months have seen the collisions of COVID-19 with climate extremes. Its impact is potentially inter-generational where poverty, disaster risks and environmental degradation converge,…

Last week saw a ‘crisis on top of a crisis’ in South Asia – the unprecedented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region was followed by the most powerful cyclone to strike India and Bangladesh…