ASEAN Vision 2025 on Disaster Management

3. Preparedness and Response 4. Resilient Recovery 5. Global Leadership

As discussed in the ACDM section of this book, three ACDM Working Groups (WG) have responsibility for implementing the program priorities: 1) the ACDM WG on Prevention and Mitigation; 2) the ACDM WG on Preparedness, Response, and Recovery; and 3) the ACDM WG on Global Leadership. The work program has broken down the priorities into concrete deliverables that are arranged as 15 subpriorities, 30 outcomes, and 117 outputs. Based on the need to build gender and social inclusion, the Work Programme 2021-2025 has a dedicated outcome on empowerment of vulnerable groups with specific outputs that integrate gender and social inclusion. Finally, the Work Programme adopts a web-based Monitoring and Evaluation system to facilitate the generation and collection of reliable data that will, it is hoped, allow the ACDM to intervene and conduct more informed decision-making and planning.81

The ACDM published ASEAN Vision 2025 on Disaster Management to chart a longerterm vision for ASEAN cooperation in disaster management beyond 2015. Adopted during the 3rd ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Disaster Management (AMMDM) and 4th AADMER Conference of the Parties (COP), the Vision sees ASEAN becoming a world leader in DM via the five-year AADMER Work Programmes82 by addressing three strategic elements: 1. Institutionalization and communications 2. Finance and resource mobilization; and 3. Partnerships and innovation.

First and foremost, the Vision recognizes the need for ASEAN’s three strategic communities – Socio-Cultural, Economic, and Political Security – to integrate their policies and projects that touch upon DM in order to professionalize and institutionalize best practice not only at the global and regional level but also at the subnational and local levels. Second, the Vision foresees ASEAN mobilizing significantly more diverse resources – financial, material, and human – to build a disaster-resilient Southeast Asia. Finally, the Vision tasks bodies responsible for implementing AADMER with rethinking their partnerships to take advantage of public and private, local, regional, and national expertise to build a network of experts, practitioners, and funders to optimize emergency response.

In terms of institutionalization and communication, the overarching goal is to ensure that ASEAN can better assess and meet needs and provide protection to communities in need during humanitarian emergencies. The Vision seeks a networked approach at local, national, and regional levels that relies on task forces that reach across government departments for policy input and connect NGOs with government practitioners in a more systematic way. This, of course, requires the improvement of communication as it underpins all other strategic efforts to build community and stakeholder trust. Thus, the Vision calls upon the ASEAN Secretariat and AHA Centre to jointly develop a comprehensive disaster communications master plan that incorporates the information assets and needs of all stakeholders, and it seeks the tasking of a dedicated communications team that ensures that the general public knows what ASEAN can do for disaster-impacted communications and, during emergencies, what ASEAN is doing.

On the financial resources front, the AHA Centre’s activities have largely been response driven, and the Vision seeks to ensure a more sustainable and flexible financial underpinning via creation of an endowment fund and more sustainable national contributions that can fund work on sustainable development and climate change adaptation rather than just emergency response. A complementary objective to financing actual disaster response is that ASEAN will play a role in encouraging the regional