Reducing vulnerability and exposure to disasters: Asia-Pacific disaster report 2012

The primary conviction of this report is driven by a concern that people’s exposure and vulnerability, experienced individually and collectively, continue to be twin challenges for the Asia-Pacific region. Faced with growing economic losses and increasingly vulnerable populations, this report has analyzed the drivers of risks and the strategies that are in place to deal with the growing risks.

The report has pursued three primary questions that all dedicated collaborators in the region need to join, “How do they and the people with whom they work understand the disaster risks in the region better?”, “How can all concerned stakeholders intensify their own work on vulnerability reduction in a truly concerted, consistent and sustained way?”, and “What strategies are needed and can be applied to reduce socioeconomic exposure to hazards?”

It demonstrates that development contributes to reducing vulnerability; investing in disaster risk reduction can reduce vulnerability; targets can stimulate investments in disaster risk reduction; ecosystem management, land-use planning, supply change management and disaster recovery have the potential to reduce exposure; the process to reduce disaster risks is non-linear, with explicit actions; innovative technologies offer new possibilities to reduce disaster risks. It further demonstrates a way that the way forward to reducing vulnerability and exposure to disasters.