Country: World Source: Asian Disaster Preparedness Center By Irfan Maqbool In April 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history and perhaps one of the earliest documented global disasters to produce cascading impacts across Asia, Europe, and North America. Volcanic ash and sulfur particles spread through the atmosphere, reducing sunlight and lowering temperatures across large parts of the world. The eruption itself lasted for days. The volcanic winter it triggered lasted nearly three years. 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer, marking the beginning of famine, epidemic, and displacement that moved continent by continent, with no one grasping their common cause. When families in New England harvested nothing from their frostbitten fields in the summer of 1816, they did not know why. When farmers in Bengal watched their neighbors die by the thousands in a cholera epidemic in 1817, they did not know the connection either. When Lord Byron, moved by the gloom descending around him, wrote his 1816 poem ‘ Darkness ‘ and described the condition of a world in crisis in a single searing line, ‘Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless,’ he too did not know its cause. Those who suffered had no name for what connected them. What began as a geological event in one location swiftly spread through food systems, public health, economies, and governance on different continents, sometimes as a direct shock and sometimes as an additional stressor on societies already under strain. The world did not learn quickly. In the century and a half after Tambora, disasters continued to take an enormous toll. Earthquakes, cyclones, and floods claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in multiple events, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The 1920 Haiyuan earthquake in China killed approximately 200, 000 people. The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and claimed over 100, 000 lives. The most devastating tolls, however, came not from the events themselves but from the famines and epidemics that often followed them. The 1931 floods in China are estimated to have killed between two and four million people. The Bengal famine of 1943, following a devastating cyclone the previous year, claimed an estimated 3 million lives. The scale and recurrence of these losses gradually made the cost of inaction impossible to ignore. Governments and the international community responded by building dedicated systems, one organized around disasters, the other around climate, each guided by its own objectives, institutional priorities, and financing architecture. Both produced progress, and both evolved separately. The question is no longer whether these systems can work independently. It is about what level of impact becomes possible when two systems begin to work with genuine coherence. The answer lies partly in understanding why they evolved separately in the first place. The disaster risk stream was formalized in 1987 with the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and subsequently progressed through successive global frameworks, supported by its own agencies, financing structures, and reporting mechanisms. The climate adaptation stream had different origins, emerging from the UNFCCC adopted at Rio in 1992. By 2015, when both the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement were adopted in the same year, the overlap was undeniable. What began as a practical division of effort had, over thirty years, quietly solidified into a defining feature of international disaster and climate risk governance. That feature has a cost, and it is not administrative. It is about what does not get done. When two systems address the same risk separately, each optimizes for its own objectives, its own reporting requirements, and its own financing mechanism. The problem is not simple duplication. It is something less visible and more persistent: two systems each doing part of the work, without a mechanism to ensure that the parts add up to something coherent. Pakistan’ s 2022 floods demonstrate what that gap looks like when it matters most. When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the country as facing “a monsoon on steroids,” he was referring to a crisis that had submerged a third of the country, affected more than 33 million people, and simultaneously disrupted the agriculture, transport, and health sectors. The monsoon brought the flood. The flood revealed deeper vulnerabilities. For the communities living through it, the crisis was one. For the institutions responding to it, there were many separate problems. Pakistan is no exception. Reviewing thirty years of international DRR and CCA development, Wen et al. (2023) find the same pattern across countries as diverse as China, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, with the two fields consistently addressed independently, separated by institutional and administrative boundaries at every level. In 2021, UNDRR published dedicated guidance on coherence between the two planning processes precisely because parallel rather than complementary outputs had become the norm. The 8th Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, held in 2025, amplified calls for governance that addresses risk across sectors. The bridges are being built, but the underlying architecture remains largely unchanged. Closing that gap requires more than political commitment. It requires deliberate adjustments to how national programs are designed, how financing is structured, and how regional cooperation is organized. The answer does not lie in merging ministries or rewriting international frameworks. It lies in making smarter use of what already exists. The most practical entry point is institutional. When countries respond to a major disaster, they do not operate in isolation. They bring relevant institutions under one roof to coordinate decisions, resources, and actions. The same logic should guide the design of national programs. Establishing joint mechanisms that connect DRR and CCA institutions at the national level, with a clear mandate to coordinate planning, consolidate financing proposals, align data systems, and develop common monitoring frameworks with standardized indicators, would reduce duplication without structural overhaul. In practice, many regulatory and planning instruments, including land use management, building codes, and infrastructure standards, already address the objectives of both agendas simultaneously. Enforcing them coherently, rather than through separate regulatory processes, would yield more durable resilience outcomes than any number of parallel programs. Vanuatu, a small Pacific island nation, has demonstrated that this level of institutional coherence is achievable. Before 2012, the country managed climate change and disaster risk through two separate bodies. The National Advisory Board on Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction, established that year, brought both under a single policy-making and advisory body covering all DRR and CCA programs, projects, and financing. It has since operated for over a decade as the coordination mechanism for both agendas, without dismantling the institutions responsible for delivering them. At the international and regional levels, joint programming windows that allow a single financing arrangement to cover both DRR and CCA objectives would considerably reduce the burden on governments. Regional organizations, which maintain long-standing technical relationships with national governments and work across both sectors, are uniquely placed to facilitate joint risk assessments, coherent program development, and the kind of peer learning that builds institutional capacity governments can sustain on their own. None of this requires starting from scratch. In 1816, the Year Without a Summer was a single crisis that the world did not yet have the means to see as one. Its consequences were met sector by sector, country by country, and none were fully addressed. Two centuries on, the risks are named, the institutions exist, and the resources far exceed what any previous generation could have mobilized. More knowledge and more financing are still needed. But neither will be sufficient if interconnected risks continue to be governed through disconnected systems. Irfan Maqbool is Director at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) in Bangkok. He can be reached at: irfan@adpc. net
World: Why Climate and Disaster Risk Governance Must Work Together
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