Sharing disaster lessons plays a crucial role in strengthening resilience across Indo-Pacific countries. It fosters unity and collaboration, promoting international cooperation to enhance regional preparedness and prosperity by investing in human capacity, scaling up traditional knowledge, and leveraging technology. 

Disasters strike cities and villages in the Indo-Pacific region every year, claiming hundreds of lives and widespread destruction of infrastructure. This is a problem exacerbated by increasing centralisation in urban areas and rising global populations, among other things, as demand for migration to urban areas continues to grow as people pursue better opportunities and living conditions. In high-risk urban areas, vulnerability to disasters varies depending on individuals’ capacities and exposure. Small island nations, particularly in the Pacific, continue to suffer severe disaster impacts, putting indigenous communities at even greater risk. To address these challenges, policymakers must strengthen regional cooperation to build long-term resilience and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ensuring safety with no one left behind. Strengthening disaster risk reduction (DRR) systems through shared experiences, research, and collaboration is crucial for assessing regional risks and improving coping strategies. By integrating local knowledge with advanced technology, nations can develop more effective and adaptive DRR solutions. A key step in this process is fostering the exchange of disaster lessons and innovative DRR strategies across borders. Learning from past disasters and leveraging both traditional and technological approaches can significantly enhance preparedness in the Indo-Pacific countries. Additionally, advanced decision-making tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time data systems, can support more effective disaster response efforts. Overall, international cooperation plays a vital role in strengthening resilience, ensuring livelihood stability, and securing a prosperous future for the Indo-Pacific region. 

Disaster Lessons from the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake  

Every disaster is local, contextual, and unique, making it harder for communities to apply the lessons and best practices directly. Policymakers need to extract generalisable and transferable disaster lessons through research and discussions.   

A good example is the Japanese national DRR policy reform based on the lessons from the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake which struck the Hanshin-Awaji region in the morning on January 17, 1995 and claimed over 6,400 lives. After the disaster, intensive research revealed that approximately 80 percent of fatalities were caused by suffocation or crushing by collapsed buildings or furniture. Also, the proportion of collapsed buildings built per an outdated earthquake resistance standard was substantially higher than that of buildings constructed per the latest standard. These findings led to the legislation of the Act on Promotion of Seismic Retrofitting of Buildings in 1995 and the amendment of the Building Standards Act in 2000 to promote the reinforcement of buildings to reduce the risk of suffocation and crushing by earthquakes, which has saved thousands of lives from earthquakes thereafter.  

Disaster Memory Preservation for Research and Education  

The stories of survivors allow us to identify with the affected people and encourage us to consider what we can do for the future.   

The Minamisanriku 311 Memorial is a place to keep records, memories, and lessons learned from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The earthquake struck off the coast of Miyagi prefecture around 3 p.m. on March 11, 2011, causing a massive tsunami, devastating coastal villages in Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima prefectures, and claiming some 20,000 human lives. The museum stands as a witness to the devastation caused by the disaster, expressing the earthquake’s profound impact and overwhelming power, and serving as a reminder to the community and younger generations of the importance of resilience for future well-being. To enhance understanding and reflection, the museum provides a learning program for visitors to engage in discussions, posing the question, “What would you do if you were at that time?” in different scenarios.  Government funding must support and maintain disaster memorial museums to keep functioning as a hub to pray for the repose of the souls and learn together to build a resilient community.  

Decision-Making Support by Advanced Technologies  

The most challenging part of disaster lesson sharing is supporting communities in interpreting disaster lessons into their context to take real action. Advanced technologies, such as Artificial intelligence (AI) and communication tools, can be game-changers in generating personalised messages from massive data to effectively and equitably assist people in making the right decision based on the recipients’ situation.  

Hazard information from institutions, such as evacuation advisories, is usually announced by administrative districts, and such sketchy advisories can be a source of optimism bias. The Global Positioning System (GPS) data can be used to determine if a user is in or near a hazardous area, providing real-time and tailored advice for those at risk or traveling toward danger zones. Also, AI can guide users with timely notifications and offer directions to safe zones, and augmented reality (AR) can be incorporated to show directions on a smartphone monitor to achieve smooth evacuation. In addition, AI-based approaches can ensure that everyone, including immigrants, international travelers, and those with visual　or hearing impairments, receives hazard information when needed, regardless of their language or physical abilities. 

Although AI is promising for DRR, policymakers must address issues like large language models’ hallucinations and ensure that science education highlights its benefits and limitations. 

Sharing Disaster Lessons and Traditional Methods  

Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen infrequently—less than once a decade or even a century—making it harder for people to learn from domestic experiences. The Indo-Pacific countries have experienced similar types of disasters, such as flooding, landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, in similar climatic or geological environments.  

States can draw on and share local knowledge in managing specific hazards, such as the bushfire management practices used by Indigenous communities in Australia and traditional methods for mitigating landslides, droughts, and pest outbreaks across the region. Indigenous and community-based approaches often offer valuable, context-specific insights for developing effective solutions. By integrating this local knowledge with modern disaster risk management practices, the region can enhance its resilience to various natural threats and improve preparedness in diverse environments.  

International Cooperation and Regional Prosperity  

The Economic and cultural ties among Indo-Pacific countries are stronger than ever. Disaster resilience, which ensures supply chains and communication networks, is a foundation of regional prosperity.  

In Official Development Assistance (ODA), Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States have been offering aid and expertise across the ASEAN and Pacific nations on building disaster resilience. Multilateral cooperation initiatives play a key role in increasing the capabilities of the development countries in the regions to have better planning and integrate the disaster risk management (DRM) into national planning to build societies that are more resilient and prosperous.   

With international support, more Indo-Pacific nations can strengthen disaster risk management strategies and invest in innovative technologies for DRR. For instance, when technology provides accurate and real-time weather data, countries can apply this information for more effective disaster response and planning. Also, an increase in weather observation data can serve as a valuable reference for weather forecasting in the Indo-Pacific region, facilitating collective learning and the progress of weather forecasting technology in the area.  

Conclusion 

Building a disaster-resilient system is an urgent issue for the prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region. Lessons from past disasters, such as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, demonstrate the value of policy reforms, while disaster memorials serve as powerful educational tools for future preparedness. Combining traditional knowledge with modern technology, such as AI and real-time data, strengthens disaster decision-making. Indigenous practices like bushfire management and flood adaptation offer valuable, context-specific solutions for disaster resilience. International collaboration and coordinated ODA efforts help Indo-Pacific nations strengthen disaster approach systems. A unified approach to DRR, combining shared experiences and innovation, fosters a safer and more resilient region. 

_{Photo: Exhibitions at the Ishinomaki City Okawa Elementary School Ruins, disaster memorial museum of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. At Okawa Elementary School, 74 elementary school students and 10 teachers lost their lives in the tsunami on March 11, 2011.}

_{Photo: Exhibitions at The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution.}

Daisuke Kageyama is a researcher at Japan’s Public Works Research Institute. Marcolino Goncalves is a national agrometeorology and remote sensing expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in Timor-Leste.  

Both authors of this article are participants of the Indo-Pacific Cooperation Network, a study-tour research programme generously funded by the Japan Foundation. You can read more about the programme here.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.