ARMOR 3rd Edition - When Disasters and Pandemic Collide: What does it mean to ASEAN, now and into the future?

The ASEAN region’s disaster risk remains among the highest in the world—and has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 11 March 2020 and 30 November 2021, the region struggled to manage the public health emergency. During this same time, record-high numbers of disasters occurred across the region. This article assesses the latest disaster risk of the ASEAN region and explores how COVID-19 impacted its disaster riskscape and disaster management and emergency response. Myanmar, the Philippines, and Indonesia remained the most-at-risk ASEAN Member States (AMS) to disasters. Moreover, the region’s disaster risk has increased since the first edition of the ASEAN Risk Monitor and Disaster Management Review (ARMOR) in 2019. The main drivers of the higher disaster risk were increased vulnerability and reduced coping capacities. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the region’s disaster risk by an average of 33% —a significant negative impact. This required adjustments on the part of National Disaster Management Organisations (NDMOs) and the AHA Centre in carrying out their respective disaster response activities. Their experiences in disaster response during the pandemic were full of challenges and lessons learned, however since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic, a more institutionalised and effective approach to disaster risk reduction is therefore needed. Towards this end, this article makes three recommendations—a more targeted method of addressing disaster risk by focusing on its drivers, monitoring of risk through the periodic conducting of risk assessments, and exploring how surplus resilience in some AMS can be shared across the region.