ASEAN, explained.
A soldier takes part in an event to plant mangrove seedlings at a beach that was devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Banda Aceh, 9 October 2024 (Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP via Getty Images)
Southeast Asia has built strong disaster institutions since 2004 – but few are designed for emergencies that start at sea.
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ASEAN’s crisis plans end where the coastline beginsASEAN’s crisis plans end where the coastline begins
On 26 December 2004, a massive undersea earthquake off Sumatra generated a tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean. Among the hardest-hit areas (Opens in new window) were Aceh in Indonesia and coastal communities in Thailand. The scale and speed of the disaster overwhelmed communities and response systems across the region. Little warning was received: the Indian Ocean lacked the tsunami warning system (Opens in new window) that exists today – information and images of the devastation emerged only after the waves had struck.
This was a turning point for regional disaster management. ASEAN accelerated work on the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) (Opens in new window), signed in 2005. The AHA Centre (Opens in new window) followed in 2011, alongside regional assessment teams, standby arrangements and exercises.
More than two decades later, satellites, seismic sensors, maritime surveillance systems, and ubiquitous mobile communications mean that disasters can often be detected, observed and communicated far more quickly (Opens in new window). The challenge is not whether we can see a crisis developing, but whether organisations can act before one failure cascades into another.
No single organisation owns the entire problem.
Recent catastrophic floods (Opens in new window) in the Nepal-China border region offered a reminder. A glacier collapse sent water and debris through the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli river system, destroying bridges and roads, and disrupting hydropower and communications. Infrastructure needed by responders was itself affected – one hazard rapidly became a systems problem. For Southeast Asia, with its extensive coastal populations, maritime infrastructure, and major trade routes in one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions (Opens in new window), what happens when a disaster crosses the shoreline?
At the ASEAN Strategic Policy Dialogue on Disaster Management in Singapore (SPDDM) in August, one message stood out (Opens in new window): the region needs to move upstream, towards anticipatory action.
The 2004 tsunami demonstrated this brutally – a similar tsunami (Opens in new window) could simultaneously damage ports, coastal communities, and vessels at sea, disabling infrastructure through which relief supplies would need to arrive. Extreme weather (Opens in new window) in a major maritime corridor could also result in authorities managing evacuations ashore while simultaneously dealing with ships seeking shelter, damaged navigation aids, and threats to underwater infrastructure.
The maritime domain becomes part of the disaster and part of the response. Navies and coast guards provide lift and rescue. Ports become logistics nodes. Commercial operators may hold capacity and information government responders do not possess. No single organisation owns the entire problem.
Better visibility therefore creates a second-order challenge: information matters only if it reaches someone able to interpret it, decide and mobilise others to act. Capability distributed across many organisations is not the same as coordinated capability. Navies may have ships, port authorities may know which terminals remain operational, and disaster management agencies may know where humanitarian needs are greatest – the crucial question is whether those pieces connect quickly enough to produce action.
Flood waters (Iqro Rinaldi/Unsplash)
ASEAN does not start from zero. Institutional development since 2004 has been substantial. AADMER provides a regional framework for disaster cooperation, the AHA Centre facilitates regional coordination, and ASEAN-ERAT provides deployable assessment capability. Exercises such as the ASEAN Regional Disaster Emergency Response Simulation Exercise (ARDEX (Opens in new window)) bring multiple sectors together.
The question is therefore whether ASEAN’s disaster-management architecture can function when a crisis simultaneously degrades several systems on which the response itself depends.
Exercises should test these dependencies. Can maritime surveillance information reach civilian responders in a usable form? If the principal port is disabled, how quickly can an alternative be identified across the organisations that depend on it? What happens when communications themselves fail?
As Lowell Bautista and I argued previously in The Interpreter (Opens in new window), Southeast Asia’s crisis-management problem is often less about creating institutions than improving the “plumbing” connecting them – the channels through which information, authority and decisions move.
The 2004 tsunami helped motivate much of ASEAN’s present disaster-management architecture. The challenge now is ensuring its connections can withstand crises crossing boundaries that institutions ordinarily treat separately.
Three shifts would help.
First, maritime scenarios need a more explicit place in regional disaster planning, including mapping critical cross-domain dependencies and stress-testing scenarios in which maritime systems are degraded while still needed for the response.
Second, exercises should move beyond multi-agency participation towards testing those dependencies. Putting disaster agencies, militaries, humanitarian responders and maritime authorities in the same exercise is different from testing whether they can continue when a port, communications network or transport system fails.
Third, preparedness requires investment in relationships (Opens in new window), as well as procedures. Responders need to know who holds information, who has authority to act, and who will answer when formal channels are overloaded.
This is what moving upstream towards anticipatory action should mean: not merely seeing hazards earlier, but understanding how failure can propagate through interconnected systems and ensuring the organisations responsible already know how to work together.
The next challenge is ensuring that when the warning comes, information becomes decisions, decisions become coordinated action, and action continues even as the surrounding systems begin to fail.
Because when the water rises, on land or at sea, that is a poor time to start exchanging business cards.
About the author
Eric Ang
Eric Ang is a PhD candidate at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, a Research Fellow with the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies (YCAPS), and a Chartered Marine Technologist (CMarTech) - IMarEST.
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