The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we must transform how disaster risk is governed. In December 2004, people hardly knew what a tsunami was and one and a half decades later, we did not have any clue about COVID-19! Two decades of disaster risk management efforts are deployed. Where are we now, what progress have we made to manage future risks? Do we need a transformation of our efforts and look for something else or improve our means?

After this COVID-19 onslaught, people are talking about bringing major “transformations” and looking for something new. But what is that? Who envisions that? Who would govern an unforeseen risk? How would the transformed approaches align with the existing frameworks or processes?

In moving into 2021 (and beyond), we should reflect on our experiences and see how the disaster risks around the Asia-Pacific are governed. We should reanalyze our ways and means; recapitulate our lessons on what has worked and what has not. The fundamental question is: “Why have we not been able to anticipate the COVID-19 pandemic? Why was it a new surprise?”

We have ample evidence now to show that we should question our existing ways of risk governance, whether these are coming from loopholes of national risk governance or fell through the gaps of global frameworks such as the World Health Organization’s capacities to anticipate such health risks, disaster risk reduction communities to foresee such disasters, impacts of climate change or even lack of coherence in sustainable development goals.  

I feel that before we adopt any drastic new transformation(s), we should first look at our existing systems and analyze those and then look for better alternatives. We can start this by looking into the regular processes of understanding risk. Identification and foreseeing COVID-19 or even tsunamis in 2004 were lacking, even though they happened more than decades apart.

We need to widen our understanding of risk for sure as these are rarely able to capture newer surprises. For example, disaster risks need to be looked at beyond “risk landscapes”, beyond profiling predominantly only the existing set of “hazards” (or multihazards), beyond the exposure of a limited set of aspects and beyond the regular vulnerable groups.

We need to be more accurate and more precise with the foresight and understanding the dynamism that creates risks and eventually shapes disasters. While understanding of the known risks is elemental, we should not be limited to rigid affixation of those to set our “normal”. New normals are always in the making.

In disaster risk governance, we need to be exhaustive, challenge our thinking process and provision ourselves into foreseeing surprises and newer risks that we are creating in our environment.  

We need to transcend our traditional thoughts and try to have a widely shared (or even contested) understanding of formulations of known and unknown phenomena, changing patterns of hazards, compositions of multiple elements into dynamic risks that can be foresighted and actions can be taken toward surprises that do not essentially create disasters.

On the other hand, before thinking of transformation, we should also reanalyze the issues of manageability of risks or even “surprises”. Actually, in retrospect, we all have a lot in our “knowledge bags” but perhaps those are kept in silos.

Climate scientists had their useful data nicely clustered into their own “cold servers”; governments have kept busy with their Cabinet meetings and their disaster risk management plans are often “shelved into cabinets of enclosures”; humanitarians, social scientists, local governments have kept their relentless love for working with communities, inequalities and inclusions to reflect realities only short-lived as long as they are in the field; and activists raised their shambles as long as they are in campaign mode.

But the tyranny is, often we forgot to connect our servers, databases, cabinets, field of realities and our knowledge bags with others. Perhaps, we need to find out ways to do that first before we try to transform. Our own systems perhaps need to be changed and connected to a whole to see the system in a holistic manner. Action against surprises requires coherent actions, connecting ourselves and going beyond our own comfort zones and knowledge silos.

But perhaps, all of us are too afraid to change ourselves and forgot about thinking of how we can address these new risks, let alone the emerging surprises! This has truly manifested during COVID-19 among the disaster risk reduction practitioners and we have gone back to the age-old situation response mode again! Perhaps we should be “smarter” than that.  

Shall we then take a moment to rethink these issues passionately? COVID-19 has probably given us ample reasons to do so; not to repeat the same mistakes time and time again. We are all committed to the Global Frameworks for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), Climate Change (such as the Paris Agreement), and Sustainable Development Goals and trying to do something meaningful. COVID-19 time is asking us to renew our commitments.

Let us not just leap into the bulldozer of transformation and the instruments of so-called resilience or development but think through those visions factoring in foresight for different avenues. We need to think about the whole system rather than only planning for our own systems in isolation.

Let’s think out of our own boxes, circles, supply-chains or whatever ways we want to operate. Both the instances of the tsunami in 2004 and now COVID-19 have given us surprises and challenged our risk governance paradigms. We have done some good and some bad but are still learning great lessons for the future.

The risk governance mechanisms in Asia-Pacific countries for disaster risk reduction, climate change and sustainable development need to be more robust to meet the environmental-social surprises, challenges of poverty and inequality, and accountability to generations to come.  

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The writer is a senior regional expert working at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC).

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