ASEAN is ready for a disaster on land. At sea, the plan runs out.

The system Southeast Asia built after the 2004 tsunami was built for land. That is the argument Eric Ang, a researcher at Singapore's RSIS, makes in the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter. The institutions themselves are real. ASEAN signed its disaster agreement, known as AADMER, in 2005. It opened the AHA Centre in 2011 to coordinate response, trained ASEAN-ERAT teams that can be sent into a disaster zone to assess damage, and runs field exercises called ARDEX. Ang's point is about where all of that stops. The shoreline, he writes, is an administrative boundary, not a disaster boundary.

Go back to the event that built the system: the undersea earthquake off Sumatra on 26 December 2004, with Aceh among the worst-hit places. A tsunami of that kind damages ports, coastal towns and ships at sea in the same hour, which means it breaks the very infrastructure relief supplies have to travel through. Ang asks what happens next. Navies and coast guards carry people and cargo. Port authorities are the ones who know which terminals still work. Private shipping firms often hold spare capacity, and information, that no government office has. No single organisation owns the whole problem. Capability spread across many organisations, he writes, is not the same as coordinated capability. Better sensors do not settle this, because a warning only counts once it reaches somebody who can read it, decide, and move other people.

At the ASEAN disaster-management policy dialogue in Singapore in August, the message Ang took away was that the region needs to work further upstream, acting before an event rather than after. He wants three things. Sea-origin scenarios should be named in regional plans instead of quietly assumed. Exercises should test whether the connections hold under stress, by failing a port, a communications network or a transport route on purpose and seeing what still functions. And someone should pay for the slow work of relationships, so that when the formal channel breaks, a responder already knows who to call.

Why it matters

In a country where the sea is the road, this gap is not abstract: an undersea quake, a volcano beside a shipping strait, or a ferry going down at night all begin outside the reach of a plan drawn for land. If you live on a coast or take boats between islands, the question worth putting to your local authority is a small one: who do they call, and have they ever practised it when the phones are down? Indonesia is the member state with the most coastline to lose from the answer.