Disaster resilience governance has failed to keep pace with the trajectory of climate change. This site exists to make the case for what needs to change — and how.

I spent three decades working for institutions designed to manage water and disaster risks in Asia, and a decade leading the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) and the Mekong River Commission (MRC) Secretariat, international organisations dedicated to cooperation in transboundary water management and disaster risk reduction. I write here as an independent practitioner, making arguments based on my experience but could not explicitly argue in my earlier roles.

The site focuses on three areas where the gap between knowledge and action is most costly: extreme heat — the leading climate killer that most DRR systems still cannot define operationally; investment in disaster risk reduction — why only a fraction of development funding goes to prevention when the returns are demonstrably higher than response; and water and extreme events — integrated water resources management needs to incorporate extreme events as central to water management, separating signals from natural variability, climate change and anthropogenic/environmental impact to support sustainable and equitable management.

Article 1 Heat kills more than almost any natural disaster — so why can’t we define it?

The absence of an operational, locally calibrated definition isn’t a technical gap. It’s a governance failure with a body count.

Article 2: Defining heat where you live — a framework for localised heat indices

How to build a locally calibrated heat index: what variables matter, why the same signal can serve many sectors, and why the instruction manual is still missing

Article 3: Working with what you have — a practical protocol for building a local heatwave threshold when the data are incomplete

No thirty-year climate record? Here’s a step-by-step protocol for building a locally valid heatwave threshold anyway

Upcoming

The investment paradox: why disaster risk reduction stays underfunded when the evidence is unambiguous

Between 2005 and 2017, only 4% of disaster-related development assistance went to prevention and preparedness. This is not a resource problem. It is a political economy problem — and it is solvable.

What integrated water management actually requires when the past is no longer a guide for the future

We know that climate change is shaping the future, so extrapolating the past is no longer credible — yet that’s still the main planning method in water management. Current infrastructure and its management are not fit for purpose. Extreme events like floods and droughts are central to IWRM, not outliers — but that can be fixed.

Focus on practice and use

The articles here are practitioner arguments, not academic reviews. They draw on field and practical experience in Southeast Asia, on time running regional institutions, and on watching the gap between what good frameworks say and what national systems actually do. The resources section is a curated depository — annotated links, organised by theme, aimed at specialists who need the primary sources rather than summaries. New pieces will appear every month or two.