Coping with disaster: Agency and resilience in the asia-pacific context

In this book, we focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Considering the scale and diversity of the region, it would be ambitious, or rather controversial, to think of the ‘Asia Pacific’ as a political, social or cultural entity. We follow Hewitt’s notion of the ‘geographicalness’ of disasters, which interconnects geography or place with human actions and experiences (Hewitt 1997: 40-2). In climatologic, geologic and geopolitical terms, the various countries in the region do share a common characteristic: their exposure and vulnerability to disasters. A recent UN report found the Asia Pacific is the world’s most disaster-prone region. According to the report, between 1970 and 2011, the number of casualties caused by various disasters in the region was around two million, accounting for 75 per cent of the total global disaster death toll. In 2011 alone, the human losses caused by disasters in the region amounted to 80 per cent of the total disaster losses globally (UNESCAP and UNISDR 2012: xxi). This situation puts national and local governments, businesses, military institutions, civil society organizations and community groups – whether from more or less developed countries – on constant alert. Considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors. In the context of the UN ‘Roadmap to the implementation of the Millennium Declaration’ of 6 September 2001 and similar international initiatives, many lessons can be learned from how Asia-Pacific communities and states are adapting and responding to the massive effects of the casualties, material losses and social trauma caused by disasters.