Asia and Pacific region covers a wide geographical area with diverse landscape, climates, societies, cultures, religions and economies. More than half of the world?s population lives in this region, on which close to half lives in less than a dollar per day. Therefore, this region contains the world's largest number of people living under poverty.

As we all know, there is a close relationship between economy and ecology i.e. whenever people are compelled to live under poverty, the pressure on ecosystem atomically increases leading to over exploitation of limited resources. Therefore the natural resource sector of Asia pacific region is under huge pressure where livelihood of most of the people is directly dependent on natural resources and related small scale enterprises.

Therefore, both the people and environment are increasingly suffering in this region due to the effect of natural disaster due to a number of reasons such as high population growth, its high density, migration and uncontrolled urbanization and possibly due to climate change.

In this region, there has been a general upward trend in the number of natural disasters due to hydro meteorological events such as Cyclones and flooding in the region while geographical disasters as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis have remained fairly steady. In 1997, the region had 33% world?s catastrophes, 67% of total casualties and 28% of global economic loss due to disasters.

The natural problems like land degradation, forest degradation, loss of biodiversity, solid waste problems are increasing with increasing population.

Therefore, it is urgent to empower the youth of this region so that these problems can be addressed on time and a healthy environment can be maintained.