Understanding Flood Risk Management in Asia: Concepts and Challenges

Abstract

In this chapter, an attempt is made to review the behavior of flood in Asian region and mechanism of flood risk management adopted among Asian nations. Flood is the most frequent natural disaster at present and vulnerability is widespread across the globe. Though, Asian region is on a knife-edge. Distribution of natural disasters in Asia followed by economic damage and human killing is illustrated in this chapter. In addition, discourse of China,

Projections of climatic extremes in a data poor transboundary river basin of India and Pakistan

“…South Asia, a subregion of continent Asia is home to about 1.87 billion population that is projected to reach to 2.38 billion by 2050 (United Nations, 2017). A large fraction of region's population lives in flood plains and coastal areas and is exposed to river and coastal flooding (Ashraf et al, 2017;World Bank, 2016). For example, the 2010 Pakistan flood caused heavy economic losses in the order of $9.2 billion and due to severe heat wave in 2015 in Karachi the death toll climbed to 1,233 (World Bank, 2013a;Saleem et al, 2018).…”

Tracing the past: an insight on flood risk management strategies in the development instruments of Bangladesh and Dhaka city

“…It has also been suggested (Parvin et al, 2018) that the present development instruments at the national level and their integration at the city level are required to be examined, reviewed, and even improved, to ensure effective and sustainable flood risk management. Moreover, the development and implementation of these policies and planning directives require active public participation (Samuels et al, 2006) and advanced research (Ashraf et al, 2017). This study also advocates managing the conflicts and ambiguities between the strategies, to learn positives from the implemented projects, and to recognize the limitations through continuous monitoring and evaluation.…”

“…The progressive integration of flood risk management strategies in the development instruments (see Table 6) is the follow-through of the learned lessons from past disasters and, thus, it is possible to develop a relatively effective flood mitigation policy and disaster control framework for Bangladesh (Ahmed et al, 2015). As a result, on a national scale, incorporating adaptation to climate change into legislation also proved a remarkable success in flood management (Abbas et al, 2016;Ashraf et al, 2017), especially in the coastal areas mentioned by Forni (2015) and Fakhruddin & Ballio (2013). Here, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) also has particularly acknowledged, how improvements in disaster preparedness, emergency response, and households' adaptive capacity have a significant impact on decreasing flood fatalities (Field et al, 2012).…”

Flood Management Issues in Hilly Regions of Uttarakhand (India) under Changing Climatic Conditions

“…It is feared that precipitation extremes and the ensuing flooding are expected to become even more frequent in most parts of Asia, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia in the next decades due to climate change. Moreover, these countries face significant difficulty acquiring land use, topography, and hydro-meteorological information, contributing to major uncertainty in flood management studies [5]. Among Asian nations, India has the most flood-related fatalities and is highly exposed to disaster risks.…”