Parvez Babul
The economic cost of climate-driven disasters (storms, floods, heat waves, and droughts) has been calculated for the first time and found to have already, over the course of the last two decades, cost humanity $16 million an hour. Two-thirds of the costs were due to loss of life, the rest is to property and other assets.
These are not mere statistics to the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH). Already, across our South Asian region this year, families have borne unbearable losses due to climate disasters. Hundreds of lives have been lost and many more have been turned upside down as homes, crops, and possessions have been lost in devastating floods and landslides.
Disasters are increasingly expensive and their impacts under-estimated. The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) 2025, highlights how direct disaster costs have grown to approximately $202 billion annually, but the true costs of disasters is over $2.3 trillion when cascading and ecosystem costs are taken into account. The burden of this cost, and the debt it creates, disproportionately falls on developing countries, but it doesn’t need to be this way.
This year’s assessment report examines the risks posed by disasters from now to 2050 and presents an indisputable case for action. It shows the eye-watering losses inflicted by disasters today, which hit vulnerable people the hardest. And it demonstrates that, on our current trajectory, costs will continue to mount as the climate crisis worsens. But it also illustrates that, by boosting and sustaining investment in disaster risk reduction and prevention, we can slow that trend and reap economic benefits. It can be through saving lives and livelihoods while driving growth and prosperity to help reach our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Kamal Kishore, special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and the head of UNDRR said, “Systematic and greater investment in disaster risk reduction and resilience can not only arrest these trends but also reverse them. When riverbank communities have access to scientific tools for planning their land use, when they have resources for building flood protection systems, and when they have early warning systems, they not only reduce damages and losses from floods, but also create conditions for prosperity and sustainable growth in their communities.”
The report also shows how the private sector can play a key role in reducing the economic damage of disasters and in filling the protection gap that leaves many countries in a worsening spiral of repeated disasters.
Different researches show that an early warning system is a set of infrastructure and capacities needed to generate and disseminate timely meaningful information of the possible extreme events or disasters (floods, drought, fire, earthquake, tsunamis) that threatens people’s lives and properties. Early warning systems for preventing losses due to floods and other disasters through national, regional and international cooperation with all the stake-holders engagement must be ensured.
Hills and mountains, particularly the HKH mountain system, have always constituted places where adaptation, mitigation, and resilience are hallmarks of the people. The Hindu Kush Himalaya is arguably the world’s most important ‘water tower’, being the largest volume of ice and snow outside of the Arctic and Antarctica. Together, the rivers support the water, irrigation, energy, industry and sanitation needs of the people living in the mountains and downstream. South Asia, with a growing population of 1.6 billion people, hosts 40 per cent of the world’s poor and malnourished on just 2.4 per cent of its land.
HKH region shows the huge inequality there is in terms of exposure to hazards worldwide. The research reveals that women and vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected when a crisis hits. To fight this inequality by mobilising the tools, knowledge and funds to ensure people in this region are resilient to future shocks, placing women and vulnerable group at the heart of our strategies. Early warning for all cannot come fast enough for the countries of the HKH region.
We urgently need the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund and the Children’s Investment Finance Fund to release funds ever faster to this region; and for compensation mechanisms to be operationalised.
Experts observed that ensuring effective early warning systems for fighting disasters in South Asian, and HKH countries, we have to perfectly engage all the stakeholders together as disasters are transboundary, regional and global issues.
The writer is a Journalist and columnist
