From Frontlines to Futures

AIDMI brought four sessions to RHPW Asia Pacific 2025, advancing community-led adaptation, climate action, and local knowledge creation.

All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) returned to the Regional Humanitarian Partnership Week (RHPW) Asia Pacific 2025 in Bangkok with four sessions that deepened its long-term focus on localisation, extreme heat, climate justice, and community-led finance. Building on last year’s RHPW session, “Localization and Adaptation by Communities: Focus on Extreme Heat” (December 10, 2024), this year’s programme moved from evidence and advocacy to practical tools, financing models, and knowledge co-creation that partners across the region could apply and adapt.

AGENDA

December 9, 2025 | S11 • 12:00–12:30 • Grand Ballroom A

Voices from the Frontlines: Small Business Adaptation to Extreme Heat and Loss & Damage

This Innovation Spotlight showcased how small businesses were already adjusting to rising temperatures. Drawing on AIDMI’s work with markets and micro-enterprises in Indian cities, the session highlighted low-cost and nature-inspired cooling solutions, the daily loss and damage experienced by informal workers, and the role of micro-insurance (such as Afat Vimo) and dedicated loss-and-damage finance in protecting livelihoods and assets.

Launch of Southasiadisasters.net: “Towards Climate and Extreme Heat Resilience: Lessons from African and Asian Communities”, Issue No. 227, December 2025

Alongside the session, AIDMI shared a new cross-regional learning brief capturing experiences from African and Asian communities facing rising extreme heat. The brief highlighted shared challenges, innovative grassroots coping strategies, and the potential for South–South collaboration on anticipatory and locally led responses.

S16 • 16:00–16:30 • Grand Ballroom A

Sustaining Progress: Mainstreaming Climate and Environmental Action in Humanitarian Contexts

Convened by the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations, this session brought together humanitarian actors from across Asia–Pacific to share case studies on applying the Charter’s commitments—from greener operations to climate-smart programming. It built directly on last year’s regional training on the Charter, offering a space to compare progress, identify gaps, and gather practical ideas for scaling climate- and environment-sensitive humanitarian action.

December 10, 2025 | S22 • 11:00–11:30 • Grand Ballroom B

Harmonizing Social Protection and Locally Led Humanitarian Cash Transfer Programs

Co-led by Change Alliance, with AIDMI participating, this session drew on policy research on cash in India to explore how humanitarian cash transfers could better align with shock-responsive social protection systems while remaining locally led and strongly gender-responsive. The discussion examined barriers faced by women and socially excluded groups, the importance of linking cash to voice, agency, and accountability, and the regulatory and standards reforms needed so national systems supported—rather than constrained—community-led response.

S28 • 11:30–12:00 • Grand Ballroom C

20 Years of Local Learning and Knowledge Co-Creation in Asia: Case of Southasiadisasters.net

In partnership with ADRRN, this session celebrated Southasiadisasters.net as a leading platform of local and regional humanitarian knowledge, with 225 issues and more than 2,500 articles contributed by 1,900 authors across 70 countries. The session explored whether there was an “Asian way” of co-creating humanitarian knowledge and reflected on how the platform had influenced policy debates, capacity-building, pilot design, evaluation, and research.

Launch of Southasiadisasters.net: “20 Years of Local Knowledge Co-creation in Asia”

AIDMI formally launched the milestone 20-year retrospective of Southasiadisasters.net, Issues 225, which continued expanding this uniquely community-rooted humanitarian knowledge archive. The launch honoured contributors, practitioners, researchers, and community leaders who had shaped two decades of learning and invited partners to co-design the next generation of locally led knowledge work across Asia.

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Looking Ahead

Together, these four sessions positioned AIDMI’s contribution to RHPW 2025 as a continuum from 2024—moving from documenting how communities localised and adapted to extreme heat, to designing the financial, climatic, and knowledge systems needed to sustain such locally led action at scale. This included strengthening small businesses, advancing social protection, integrating climate and environmental action, and deepening long-term knowledge co-creation across Asia.

📣 Participants in Bangkok explored how local leadership and innovation were reframing humanitarianism for a changing world.