Research conducted at the University of California, Berkeley
Effective disaster management in the Asia-Pacific is becoming a critical issue as the region encounters increasingly frequent and unpredictable natural disasters. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), over half of the 226 natural disasters that occurred during 2014 took place in this region, impacting close to 79.6 million people. In 2005, the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) formed the Emergency Preparedness Working Group (EPWG) to improve regional disaster management and build a more resilient community. However, since then APEC’s disaster-related initiatives, including the most recent “new collaborative platform” introduced in November 2015, omitted considerations of various crucial challenges such as the problem of an uncoordinated bureaucracy, the lack of medical doctors involved, and the absence of gender perspective. This project aims to address these three major shortcomings for which the current disaster management community fails to account.