This collection presents nine exemplary cases from China, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, and Spain. The cases represent practices of restoring critical ecosystems—including mangroves, coastal salt marshes, and sandy shores— as well as the ecological enhancement of seawalls. They demonstrate comprehensive benefits across multiple dimensions, including disaster prevention and mitigation, ecological function enhancement, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and socio-economic development.

Natural disasters are frequent and unwelcome visitors to Asia. Nowhere else does nature’s fury strike with such frightening regularity, wiping out families, destroying homes and livelihoods, and leaving broken communities in its wake. Disasters like Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines last November, radiate lasting hardship. More than 5,000 lives were tragically lost and many more people left homeless. But jobs were also lost; businesses went bankrupt; schooling missed; and vast national economic resources diverted to the recovery effort.

This new handbook strengthens procedures for estimating the effects and impacts of disasters and provides an integral accounting approach to bring them together into a coherent picture, distinguishing between losses and additional costs and with due account of linkages between different sectors of the economy. It also addresses crosscutting issues such as gender and the environment. The first section of the handbook covers conceptual aspects of disasters and the basis for the methodology for estimating their effects.

Floods in the past decade have been more frequent and more intense. They have become the result of greater interaction between human society and the natural environment, exacerbated by urbanization and climate change. This publication illustrates the more recent and unprecedented flood devastations in Bangkok, Beijing, and Manila, and some of the international best practices in urban floodwater management.

The guide is organised into a set of modules, each representing important aspects of the successor to the existing Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA). By presenting evidence in the form of data, facts and summary messages, the modules highlight what should be covered by a new agreement. This document is the second draft prepared by ODI and CDKN. It includes seven original modules, three of which have been extended.

The guide serves as a primer for decision and policy makers, technical specialists, central, regional and local government officials, and concerned stakeholders in the community sector, civil society and non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. The Guide embodies the state-of-the art on integrated urban flood risk management. The Guide starts with a summary for policy makers which outlines and describes the key areas which policy makers need to be knowledgeable about to create policy directions and an integrated strategic approach for urban flood risk management.

This thematic brief summarises the key findings of the report relevant to water resources, and water management. It draws exclusively on material from SREX. It includes an assessment of the science and the implications for society and sustainable development. It is intended to be useful for policy-makers, decision-takers and planners, locally, nationally, and regionally. In recognition that these readers will have many competing calls on both their time and budgets, this brief seeks to highlight key thematic findings and learning from SREX.

This compendium aims to provide examples of good practice in preparedness for, and awareness of, tsunami and other sea-level related hazards, selected from the case-studies presented at a NEAMTIC workshop (UNESCO-IOC, 2012), complemented by experience gained from countries outside the NEAM region. It presents examples on how to prepare, respond to or mitigate/reduce such hazards.

Coastal inundation as a result of global sea-level rise and storm surge events is expected to affect many coastal regions and settlements. Adaptation is widely accepted as necessary for managing inundation risk. However, managing inundation risk is inherently contentious because of many uncertainties and because a large number of stakeholder interests and values are mobilised. For these reasons, among others, adaptation progress in many countries has been slow.

The Coastal Risk Management Guide has been prepared to assist local councils, the development industry and consultants incorporate the sea level rise benchmarks in coastal hazard assessments. This includes coastal hazard assessments carried out as part of a coastal hazard definition study during a coastal zone management planning process or for assessing coastal hazard constraints for proposed coastal developments. The information in this guide updates the sea level rise information in the NSW Coastline Management Manual (NSW Government 1990).