Vulnerable regions of the world such as South-Asia, South-East Asia, ASEAN and the Pacific face diverse disaster challenges ranging from purely climatic to geo-physical and anthropogenic, posing risk to habitats and lives. Over the last few years, there has been a paradigm shift in disaster management globally from ‘response and relief’ to a ‘prevention, mitigation and risk reduction’ based approach. However, this ‘2nd paradigm shift’ in approach towards ‘convergence’ and ‘mainstreaming’ witnesses certain challenges. Recently, the 6th Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in June 2014 at Bangkok highlighted the importance of local resilience building and climate resilience in infrastructure and livelihoods along with improving local planning involving communities and improving financial mechanisms. Another major highlight of discussion was the evolution of risk-sensitive land-use planning into broad risk sensitive landscape based planning for integrating risk mitigation into various dimensions of economic and physical development.

While nations and regions have been discussing HFA-2 (Post-Hyogo Framework on DRR beyond 2015) to be adopted in the 3rd World Conference on DRR at Sendai in 2015, it appears pertinent to draw composite lessons from recent initiatives for enabling climate resilience into policies and local actions in India. The National Institute of Disaster Management’s (NIDM) training module on mainstreaming CCA-DRR into district level planning (2014) focusses on the following approaches:

• Improving disaster management plans (including mitigation and capacity building plans) at the national, sub-national and local levels. This should include improving HRVCA (hazard-risk, vulnerability and capacity analysis), using climatic projections at relevant levels to understand future disaster risks and emphasis on non-structural interventions.

• Improving sectoral / departmental developmental plans (including on-going and proposed) programmes and schemes by including climate resilience factors and ensuring that envisaged actions and provisions reduce disaster risks and do not increase vulnerability further.

• Enabling community under-standing and local organisations to recognise impending dangers to their lives, resources and property in a systems approach by understanding upstream-downstream relations and physical and environmental limits to development in a particular habitat.

• Developing and implementing ‘Risk Indicator System and Risk Auditing’ for districts and local bodies.

• Field testing the newly evolved approach of ‘Mitigation Analysis’ to understand and quantify (through indices) the disaster risk mitigation benefits of programmes and schemes (on spatial and temporal grid basis).

• Working out strategies and action plan models for ‘climate resilient and disaster resistant infrastructure’ systems and services (including natural infrastructure).

• Integrating climate resilience and future risk reduction strategies into post-disaster and post-conflict developmental planning and improving Post-Disaster Damage and Needs Assessment (PDNA) to include disaster effects on climatic risk factors.