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Adaptation is rapidly emerging as a critical pathway to safeguard communities and ecosystems from the impacts of climate variability which creates unpredictable challenges that are hard to plan for…

Photo credit: Press Information Bureau, Government of India Blog

In July 2024, cascading impacts of multiple landslides in Wayanad, Kerala—a state of India – have killed more than 400 people and resulted in colossal socio-economic impacts. The landslides were…

Photo credit: Indian Institute of Technology, Patna, India Blog

The summer of 2024 has shattered heat records, starkly illustrating the harsh realities of our warming planet. In India alone, the heatwave has claimed over 100 lives and caused more than 40,000…

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Scientific assessments reveal that the Third Pole (TP), encompassing the vast glaciated mountain systems of Asia, is warming at an alarming rate of over 0.3 ºC per decade, surpassing the global…

Photo credit: Gorakhpur Environment Action Group Blog

The ESCAP Asia-Pacific SDG Progress Report 2024 flagged the region’s regression on SDG 13, climate action. To reverse this trend, it is imperative that both mitigation and adaptation go hand in hand…

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2023 was the warmest year on record. The latest Copernicus Climate Change Service highlights that February 2023 to January 2024 was the first time that we experienced 12 consecutive months of…

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On 12/13 November 1970, the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh. The hard lesson learnt from ‘Bhola’ was not having an effective cyclone warning…

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On 4 October 2023, a cloudburst over Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim  triggered a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in the Teesta river basin, which claimed over 30 lives, destroyed the 1,200 MW…

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The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration was unanimously adopted during the G20 Leader’s Summit on 9-10 September 2023. It has many takeaways covering a variety of pressing global challenges, including…

Photo credit: World Meteorological Organization/Muhammad Amdad Hossain(Bangladesh) Blog

The last few weeks have seen large scale floodings in southwestern China and northwestern India  including its capital, Delhi. The deluge in China and India is no exception to an emerging trend…

Photo credit: UNICEF/Sultan Mahmud Mukut Blog

On 14 May 2023, cyclone Mocha hit Myanmar. Accompanied by sustained winds of 180-190 km/h and violent gusts, torrential rainfall and flooding, Mocha made the landfall in a context of…

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When the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami claimed the lives of 230,000 people in a matter of hours, the world realized the gap in preparedness in absence of effective early warning. It was this shared…

Photo credit: UNICEF/UN0691098/Sami Malik Blog

"The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids -- the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” stated UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently as floods submerged much…

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“The global battle to reduce disaster losses by 2030 will be won or lost in Asia and the Pacific” – Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

This…

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Floods are a recurring phenomenon in Bangladesh and the adjoining state of Assam, India. The ongoing large-scale flooding here is not an exception. Floods often trigger landslides and large-scale…

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In 2022, the early onset of heatwaves in South Asia was a unique example of compounding and cascading risks in this interconnected world. Heatwaves that struck India early this year coincided with…

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This year, India and Pakistan have 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 early…

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As we inch closer to the 1.5°C target and beyond in this century, the sixth generation of CIMP6 climate models (known as Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6) and the Shared Socio-economic…

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On 24 September, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, will convene the High-level Dialogue on Energy at summit level, under the auspices of the UN General Assembly. This will be…

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Ending poverty in all its forms is the first of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While significant progress to reduce poverty had been made at the global and regional levels by 2019, the…