Displacements in the Asia Pacific region are escalating. The region has for decades experienced more than half of the world’s natural disasters and, in recent years, a disproportionately high share of extreme weather-related disasters, which displaced 19 million people in 2013 alone. This volume offers an innovative and thought-provoking Asia-Pacific perspective on an intensifying global problem: the forced displacement of people from their land, homes, and livelihoods due to development, disasters and environmental change. This book draws together theoretical and multidisciplinary perspectives with diverse case studies from around the region – including China’s Three Gorges Reservoir, Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and the Pacific’s Banaba resettlement. Focusing on responses to displacement in the context of power asymmetries and questions of the public interest, the book highlights shared experiences of displacement, seeking new approaches and solutions that have potential global application. This book shows how displaced peoples respond to interlinked impacts that unravel their social fabric and productive bases, whether through sporadic protest, organised campaigns, empowered mobility or; even community-based negotiation of resettlement solutions. . The volume will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in development studies, environmental and climate change studies, anthropology, sociology, human geography, international law and human rights.

'Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.' Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.

Displacements in the Asia Pacific region are escalating. The region has for decades experienced more than half of the world’s natural disasters and, in recent years, a disproportionately high share of extreme weather-related disasters, which displaced 19 million people in 2013 alone. This volume offers an innovative and thought-provoking Asia-Pacific perspective on an intensifying global problem: the forced displacement of people from their land, homes, and livelihoods due to development, disasters and environmental change. This book draws together theoretical and multidisciplinary perspectives with diverse case studies from around the region – including China’s Three Gorges Reservoir, Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and the Pacific’s Banaba resettlement. Focusing on responses to displacement in the context of power asymmetries and questions of the public interest, the book highlights shared experiences of displacement, seeking new approaches and solutions that have potential global application. This book shows how displaced peoples respond to interlinked impacts that unravel their social fabric and productive bases, whether through sporadic protest, organised campaigns, empowered mobility or; even community-based negotiation of resettlement solutions. . The volume will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in development studies, environmental and climate change studies, anthropology, sociology, human geography, international law and human rights.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

The start of the new millennium will be remembered for deadly climate-related disasters—the great floods in Thailand in 2011, Super Storm Sandy in the United States in 2012, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013, to name a few. In 2014, 17.5 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters, ten times more than the 1.7 million displaced by geophysical hazards. What is causing the increase in natural disasters and what effect does it have on the economy? Climate Change and Natural Disasters sends three messages: human-made factors exert a growing influence on climate-related disasters; because of the link to anthropogenic factors, there is a pressing need for climate mitigation; and prevention, including climate adaptation, ought not to be viewed as a cost to economic growth but as an investment. Ultimately, attention to climate-related disasters, arguably the most tangible manifestation of global warming, may help mobilize broader climate action. It can also be instrumental in transitioning to a path of low-carbon, green growth, improving disaster resilience, improving natural resource use, and caring for the urban environment. Vinod Thomas proposes that economic growth will become sustainable only if governments, political actors, and local communities combine natural disaster prevention and controlling climate change into national growth strategies. When considering all types of capital, particularly human capital, climate action can drive economic growth, rather than hinder it.

This book explores economic concepts related to disaster losses, describes mechanisms that determine the economic consequences of a disaster, and reviews methodologies for making decisions regarding risk management and adaptation. The author addresses the need for better understanding of the consequences of disasters and reviews and analyzes three scientific debates on linkage between disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change. The first involves the existence and magnitude of long-term economic impact of natural disasters on development. The second is the disagreement over whether any development is the proper solution to high vulnerability to disaster risk. The third debate involves the difficulty of drawing connections between natural disasters and climate change and the challenge in managing them through an integrated strategy. The introduction describes economic views of disaster, including direct and indirect costs, output and welfare losses, and use of econometric tools to measure losses. The next section defines disaster risk, delineates between “good” and “bad” risk-taking, and discusses a pathway to balanced growth. A section entitled “Trends in Hazards and the Role of Climate Change” sets scenarios for climate change analysis, discusses statistical and physical models for downscaling global climate scenarios to extreme event scenarios, and considers how to consider extremes of hot and cold, storms, wind, drought and flood. Another section analyzes case studies on hurricanes and the US coastline; sea-level rises and storm surge in Copenhagen; and heavy precipitation in Mumbai. A section on Methodologies for disaster risk management includes a study on cost-benefit analysis of coastal protections in New Orleans, and one on early-warning systems in developing countries. The next section outlines decision-making in disaster risk management, including robust decision-making, No-regret and No-risk strategies; and strategies that reduce time horizons for decision-making. Among the conclusions is the assertion that risk management policies must recognize the benefits of risk-taking and avoid suppressing it entirely. The main message is that a combination of disaster-risk-reduction, resilience-building and adaptation policies can yield large potential gains and synergies.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.