The Southeast Asian Nations are undergoing rapid transformational socio-economic changes with associated dynamic changes in the hazard, vulnerability and risk characteristics in these countries. Climate change is expected to exacerbate these risks acting as a threat multiplier. The ASEAN countries have put in place far-reaching disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation plans, laws, and regulations at the regional and national levels, and are progressing to localize them to sectoral and community level. One important element that countries needed to make significant progress is in integrating climate change projections into disaster risk assessments that can help understand and address the future systemic risks. 

Keeping this need in view, the project aims to assess the systemic risks of floods and landslides in a river basin context by integrating climate change projections into risk assessments. These integrated risk assessments provide an important tool for the administration to understand systemic risks and address the same through planning processes. The landslide risk assessments based on the future climate projections provided an important perspective view to the planners. Developing climate-proof risk assessments helped in understanding the systemic risks and build the capacity of institutions, policies and planning processes. The forward-looking risk assessments have empowered the decision-makers with the ability to manage rapidly changing risk profiles because of climate change uncertainties. The ability to understand uncertainties in assessing future systemic risks is a step forward in risk reduction planning and implementation.

The landslide hazard and risk assessment was done based on the concept introduced by the UNDRR (formerly known as UNISDR) as described in the Guideline of the ASEAN Project for Disaster Risk Reduction by Integrating Future Climate Scenarios into Landslide Risk Assessment, and was piloted in a Phoukhoun river basin located in Luang Prabang Province of Lao PDR and Taunggyi river basin located in Shan State of Myanmar. The landslide risk assessment conducted for two different scenarios of RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 for three different projected year of 2030, 2050 and 2080.

The majority of the data used for this study is freely available from the public domain. A Quantum Geographic Information System/QGIS, an open source GIS software was used to process, analyze the data in the GIS environment and produce maps.

The landslide risk was classified into five different classes, namely, very high, high, moderate, low and very low. The risk assessment provides essential information and the outputs are useful for a better understanding of the potential impact caused by landslides, hence, better disaster risk reduction strategy can be developed and or enhanced, and prioritization of efforts for the reduction and mitigation of future landslide hazards.