Towards integrated disaster risk management: case studies and trends from Asia

Abstract

Integrated disaster risk management (IDRiM) is a process for comprehensively and credibly estimating and managing risks from multiple synergistic sources, and, as such, presents a challenge to science and policy communities. IDRiM becomes increasingly complex as human interventions contribute to escalating disasters losses. Over the period 1984–2003, more than four billion people were affected by extreme natural events: between 1990 and 1999 the costs of natural disasters were more than 15 times higher than during the period 1950–1959 (World Bank 2006a). The main factors, or drivers, behind rising economic losses are changes in land use and increases in the concentration of people and capital in high-risk areas, for example, in coastal regions exposed to windstorms, in fertile river basins exposed to floods, and in urban areas exposed to earthquakes (Miletti 1999). There is also mounting evidence that climate change is contributing to rising weather-related disaster events. Observations of long-term and widespread changes in wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather, including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves, and the intensity of tropical cyclones, are increasingly linked with climate change (Schonwiese et al. 2003; Emanuel 2005; IPCC 2007). Integrated disaster risk management calls for rigorous risk analyses that integrate multiple hazards and their drivers for estimating potential human, economic and