Adaptation to Climate Change: Needs and Opportunities in Southeast Asia (Report‪)‬

I. Introduction The impacts of climate change, which include the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts and storms, and rising sea level, are already being felt in Asia and the rest of the world. Whether induced by climate change or other factors, hydrometeorological hazards cause tremendous destruction. They account for 85 per cent of all natural disasters and caused 75 per cent of the economic losses from natural causes from 1980 to 2005 (Golnaraghi, 2006). The Natural Disasters Data Book (2006) indicated that a thirty-year analysis of statistics on natural disasters in the world had Asia accounting for "about 90 per cent of all those affected by disasters and more than 50 per cent of the total fatalities and economic losses". Projected future impacts of climate change in the region are staggering. A 40-cm sea level rise by 2080 could displace as many as 55 million people in South Asia, and 21 million people in Southeast Asia (IPCC 2001). A World Bank study (Dasgupta et al. 2007) on the impacts of sea level rise shows that a 1 metre sea level rise could displace 60 million people in many of the 84 coastal developing countries; in Vietnam alone, 11 per cent of the population will be affected. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) report projected an 18-58 cm sea level rise by the end of the century. But these are conservative estimates and do not take into account the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which could easily raise the sea level much higher.