Disasters threat to poor in Asia-Pacific

NEW YORK - Disaster risk is outpacing resilience in the Asia-Pacific and putting people in the region at risk of being pushed back into poverty, the latest report from a United Nations regional commission has said.

"Disasters can very quickly strip poor people of their livelihoods, bringing deeply disruptive impacts that push them back into absolute poverty or trap them in an intergenerational transmission of poverty," said Shamshad Akhtar, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, as she launched the report in Bangkok on Tuesday.

The Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2017 shows that the greatest impacts of disasters are in countries which have the least capacity to prepare or respond to these events. Between 2000 and 2015, the low and lower middle-income countries in the region experienced almost 15 times more disaster deaths than the region's high-income countries.