Over the past decades, ASEAN has developed a number of working groups to address
natural disasters and environmental issues. However, it was not until the Indian Ocean
Tsunami in 2004 that ASEAN realized the need to reconsider its disaster management
approach. The severe tsunami left hundreds of thousands of deaths across 13 nations.
The devastation has alerted regional countries that they face common disaster risks and
that each nation is incapable of coping with such large-scale disasters alone.