Abstract
In the early twenty-first century, Asia’s accelerated urban transition is both a major source and target of increasingly frequent and costly environmental disasters. Asia is home to more than half of the global urban population, and its share is increasing. Currently, over 1.5 billion people live in Asia’s urban settlements. High rates of rural to urban migration coupled with industrialisation and the advent of automobile societies that are drivers of global climate change and related environmental degradation have amplified the exposure, intensity and human as well as material costs of environmental disasters. The dominant pattern of urban expansion along Asia’s coastlines and river deltas is also producing extended urban agglomerations that are at or below sea level, raising the vulnerabilities of their growing populations to floods, storm surges, typhoons and the unpredictable impacts of climate change on local ecologies. As Asia’s environmental disasters occur at multiple scales and impact upon urban populations in different ways with unintended and often long-term consequences, a multi-sector and multidisciplinary approach is needed to adequately address the multitude of theoretical and practical dimensions of disaster governance in urbanising Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
From all environmental disaster-related fatalities incurred globally between 1970 and 2011, 75 % were in Asia (ESCAP/UNISDR 2012, xxii).
- 2.
Although Asia is still one of the world’s least urbanised regions, its urban population is expected to almost double to reach 2.6 billion by 2030, increasing the urban share of total population from the current 48–55 % (Miller and Bunnell 2014, pp. 1, 6; United Nations 2004; pp. 2–3; United Nations 2014, p. 6).
- 3.
Earth systems can be defined as ‘The totality of systems operating at the Earth’s surface’ that include ‘geomorphological, ecological, hydrological and pedological systems’ (Knight and Harrison 2014, p. 2).
- 4.
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Miller, M.A., Douglass, M. (2016). Disaster Governance in an Urbanising World Region. In: Miller, M., Douglass, M. (eds) Disaster Governance in Urbanising Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-649-2_1
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