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Photo credit: Wikipedia/Rishabkhetpalia Blog

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…

Photo credit: UN in India Blog

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: iStockphoto/Nastco Op-ed

We are living in an era of a polycrisis: the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency and the Russian invasion of Ukraine continue to send shockwaves through Asia and the…

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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The recent crises have erased at least one decade of development progress. Why?

The 2023 ESCAP-ADB-UNDP SDG Partnership report explores the impacts of the polycrisis of COVID-19,…

Photo credit: iStockphoto/Dilok Klaisataporn Op-ed

The latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes for grim reading: Every fraction of a degree of warming comes with escalated threats, from deadly heatwaves to…

Photo credit: Freepik/Rawpixel.com Blog

Drought is a slow-onset disaster that causes significant damage to the environment.  Unlike most other natural hazards, the effects of drought often accumulate slowly over an extended period…

UNOCHA/Matteo Minasi Blog

Multiple earthquakes, the strongest being of 7.7 magnitude, struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria on 6 February 2023. The earthquake was extremely powerful, and more deadly because it…

Photo credit: ESCAP Tsunami Trust Fund Blog

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…