BANGKOK — Southeast Asia is one of the regions most prone to natural disasters, but people there feel best prepared to deal with them, according to a new analysis released Thursday.
It would seem obvious that countries along and around the Pacific Ring of Fire, vulnerable to hazards like earthquakes, typhoons and storm surges, would be the best prepared, but a Gallup poll for Lloyd's Register Foundation found that this isn't necessarily the case elsewhere.
“Frequent exposure to danger is not the only factor that determines how prepared people feel,” Benedict Biggers, a Gallup research consultant, told The Associated Press.
The report noted that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has played a key role in disaster risk reduction, and Viggers said the region's broad approach includes extensive and effective early warning systems, expanding community approaches and regional cooperation, and better access to disaster financing.
“Southeast Asia's superior sense of disaster preparedness can be linked to its higher exposure to disasters, relatively high levels of resilience from individuals to society as a whole, and wider regional efforts and investments in disaster risk management,” he said.
Forty percent of Southeast Asians said they had experienced a natural disaster in the past five years, as did a similar number of South Asians (36%).However, 67% of Southeast Asians felt they were best prepared to protect their families and 62% had emergency response plans, while 49% and 29% respectively in South Asia felt least prepared.
Respondents in North America, where disaster rates are much lower than in Southeast Asia, said they felt slightly underprepared, while those in Northern and Western Europe fell somewhere in the middle.
Ed Morrow, senior campaigns manager at Lloyd's Register Foundation, a UK-based global safety charity, said the results from Southeast Asia, made up mainly of low- and middle-income countries, suggest that wealth is not a determining factor in disaster response or preparedness.
“It is clear that Southeast Asia is a region that has a lot to teach the world in terms of disaster preparedness,” he said.
Globally, no country ranked higher than the Philippines when it came to experiencing natural disasters in the past five years, with 87 percent of respondents saying they had experienced one.
They are also among the top four countries with the highest percentage of households that have a disaster preparedness plan, all in Southeast Asia: the Philippines (84%), Vietnam (83%), Cambodia (82%), Thailand (67%), and the United States (62%).
The lowest rates were in Egypt, Kosovo and Tunisia, all at 7%.
The data was drawn from the biennial World Risk Poll, with the main results of the 2023 survey released in June. The disaster questions focused on natural disasters, rather than conflict or financial catastrophes, and excluded the COVID-19 pandemic.
The survey was conducted among people aged 15 and over in 142 countries and was based on telephone or face-to-face conversations with around 1,000 respondents in each country except China, where around 2,200 people were contacted online.
The margin of error was plus or minus 2.2 to 4.9 percentage points, with an overall confidence level of 95 percent.
“Our intention is that this freely available data will be used by governments, regulators, companies, NGOs and international organizations to shape and target policies and interventions to keep people safe,” Morrow said.
