Asia-Pacific is world’s most disaster-prone region, says UN

ISLAMABAD: The year 2022 was yet another reminder that Asia-Pacific is the world’s most disaster-prone region, and the floods were the deadliest, accounting for 74.4 per cent of disaster events in the region and 88.4 per cent of total deaths globally, a United Nations report said on Wednesday.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) says the year 2022 also witnessed cascading disasters where a chain of hazard events took place followed by the initial and residual impacts.

Pakistan witnessed melting glaciers from the record spring heat and this combined with an unprecedented monsoon rain resulted in a historic flooding that devastated a large part of the country.

The report, “2022: A year when disasters compounded and cascaded” went on to say that “it was a unique example of cascading disasters where a heat wave triggered the melting of glaciers and the event converged with a large scale monsoon resulting in drawn out flooding and attendant water-borne diseases”.

Further, Pakistan faced a cascading crisis in the wake of rising food and fuel prices and significant economic challenges persisting from even prior to the recent floods, the report says.

The UN-ESCAP says the major disasters of 2022 fell across the development spectrum, from floods in Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Thailand, drought in China, Kiribati and Tuvalu, typhoons Megi and Nalgae in the Phillipines, heatwaves in India, Japan and Pakistan to earthquakes in Afghanistan, Fiji and Indonesia.

The tropical Pacific has been in a la nina state throughout the year and the period from August to October 2022 marked the first “triple-dip” La Niña event of the 21st century. This, coupled with a warmer planet, created a series of extreme weather events world-wide.

The 2022 Pakistan flood which affected 33m people and caused 1,739 deaths was a notable example.

In 2022, India and Pakistan recorded their warmest ever March and April. The pre-monsoon period in South Asia is usually marked with excessively high temperatures, especially in May, but scientists believe that the early heat waves were a consequence of persisting north-south low-pressure patterns which formed over India during winter when La Niña phenomenon occurs in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Driven by the hazard characteristics and the underlying diverse socio-economic vulnerabilites and exposure, the major disasters in 2022 were complex with compounding and cascading impacts.

For example, the 2022 earthquakes in Afghanistan and Indonesia were mild with 5.9 and 5.6 magnitudes, but the impacts of both were relatively severe.

The fundamental reason was the critical vulnerability of community at risk and direct exposure of economic and social assets near the epicentres of the earthquakes.