Disaster Resilience Starts with Understanding Risk: A Recap of the DRC Online Summit 2026
On the evenings of August 25 & 26, 2026, animal protection organizations (APOs) from across Asia and beyond came together for the DRC Online Summit 2026, the AfA Disaster Resilience Coalition’s (DRC) first dedicated event. Themed Understanding Disaster Risk: The First Step, the summit was built around a simple but important premise: we cannot protect what we do not understand.
For grassroots APOs already stretched thin, disaster preparedness often gets pushed down the priority list. This summit was designed to highlight how preparedness must start now, and that understanding risk is already an action in itself.
Here’s what was covered during the two-day summit. Recordings are available on AfA’s YouTube channel.
Naming the Risk with APOs
Day One focused on understanding risk and the risk assessment process.
First speaker featured Naritsorn (Nort) Pholperm from Four Paws International encouraged participants to look beyond obvious hazards such as floods, earthquakes and storms, and consider the wider social, economic and environmental factors that can shape risk — including risks faced by animal responders themselves.
His closing message captured an important theme of the summit:
We cannot separate, we cannot think in silo of doing just for one species... when disasters happen, when emergencies happen, we all stay in the same area. We all have some bonding... Coordination is very key. We cannot leave anything behind…Everything needs to go together.
— Naritsorn (Nort) Pholperm, Four Paws
Jennifer Gardner from IFAW followed as the second speaker to show how a small team can do risk assessment and that it does not require much technical expertise. It can begin by asking what could happen, what could be affected, how serious the consequences could be, and what can be done about it.
When asked about defining the scope and where organizations should start, she responded with a practical reminder:
You have to put your own oxygen mask on before you can share it with others...If you do have a facility where you keep animals, doing the risk assessment is really important before you start to move on to that community level planning.
— Jennifer Gardner, IFAW
After a small break, it was time for participants to put these concepts into practice over a one-hour Risk Assessment Workshop. All participants were divided into four breakout groups based on their organizational type. Then everyone shared their opinions about the kinds of hazards, consequences, and likelihoods of risks that can take place in a scenario given to them that was specific to their breakout room. A discussion with Jen and Nort after the workshop gave participants space to reflect on challenges they might have faced during the exercise and to clarify any confusion about the process.
As one participant shared: We had to tell ourselves not to label every ‘consequence’ as being "catastrophic"..., showcasing a real challenge in trying to manage the balance between including different voices from within an organization or a community, and getting inputs from numerous people with various subjective perceptions on how severe and how likely a disaster can happen.
The workshop provided a practical starting point for participants to get familiar with the fundamentals of animal-inclusive risk assessment so that they can take the process back to practising it with their team members.
Learning from Real Experiences
Day Two moved from the fundamentals of risk to real experiences – featuring three case studies and one panel discussion from across the region.
The first case study was by Sulakshana Rana of Animals Nepal, who explored how social and geographical factors can shape vulnerability. She reiterated what was covered on Day One about looking beyond hazard – by encouraging participants to consider what makes communities vulnerable and what capacity exists to respond. Her presentation focused on how the loss of animals has made people more vulnerable, especially the working equids that communities rely heavily on in Nepal for household income, transport, food security, and for recovering from a disaster.
Then, Dr. Bhaskar Choudhury of the Wildlife Trust of India shared lessons from years of flood response in Kaziranga, including how well-intentioned rescue efforts can sometimes create additional risks. He also highlighted how the communities already understand the hazards they live alongside, and APOs should provide the methods for assessment and preparedness where local knowledge can be applied in a systematic way.
In the third session, Ade Andreawan of Bali Animal Welfare Association (BAWA) and Jennifer Gardner of IFAW shared a candid moment presenting nine years of funder–fundee partnership in Bali. What began as emergency response funding evolved into a resilience-building partnership."
Jen described what made IFAW rethink their role as a funder:
What really happens when the vulnerability is still existing but the traditional crisis is over?... As the funder, oftentimes when there is a disaster we see that immediate, visible output — feeding animals, treating wounded animals, great photos, emotional stories. But when we look at preparedness funding, we don't always see those immediate outcomes... are we always going to fund the consequences of a disaster risk, or do we have to invest in eliminating those risks?
— Jennifer Gardner, IFAW
Ade, who represented the local organization that works closely with the communities in Bali, went on to share four important lessons for disaster funders: 1) Respect local wisdom: communities understand vulnerabilities far better than the external expert. 2) Flexible timelines: action requires passion, capital, flexible timelines, and room to experiment without fear of failure. 3) Invest in preparedness: real resilience requires investing long before the crisis strikes. 4) Dynamic trust: mutual learning and feedback between the funder and the fundee.
— Ade Andreawan, BAWA
Finding Common Ground for Collaboration
The summit closed with a cross-sectoral panel that brought together perspectives from humanitarian, public health, animal protection, and climate change mitigation sectors. Moderated by Kelly Donithan, an independent consultant in animal disaster management, who opened the session with a story from Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, 2019 - walking ten kilometers with a community leader who had lost family members in the flood, and whose single remaining priority was saving the twelve cattle his community had left.
Sanjay Pariyar of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction could relate to Kelly’s story as he critiqued that even sophisticated systems like UNDRR's Early Warning for All initiative remain "heavily human-centric", leaving animals and animal owners to fend for themselves during emergencies. He also called for disaggregating risk assessments by animal type — farm animals, companion animals, wildlife — since the needs, how they are valued and the politics of who prioritizes them differ sharply.
Rachelle Anne Miranda of the Department of Science and Technology Philippines added to the discussion by sharing an initiative by the Philippines to shift toward "impact-based forecasting", i.e. translating a hazard warning into what it will actually mean for a specific community's capacity — and made a case for putting animals on the same vulnerability maps used for people.
Besides cross-sectoral collaboration in anticipation of disasters, for disaster response, Nurrista Agrestryana of the Indonesian Red Cross described a community-based surveillance system that helped the Indonesian Red Cross reach more than 135,000 people during a rabies outbreak response in East Nusa Tenggara — flagging sick or biting animals at the village level and routing that information to both human and animal health authorities. Demonstrating the essential need for information sharing and coordinated actions across jurisdictions to contain a disease outbreak.
Praveen Suresh of Humane World for Animals India grounded the discussion in economics and emotion at once, noting that more than 70% of people in rural India depend on animals for daily survival — and that losing them is rarely just a financial blow. People refuse to leave their animals behind during a disaster evacuation because there's more than just economic value; the human-animal bond cannot be underestimated.
He also described Kerala's School Disaster Management Cadets — student groups trained to identify local hazards using Google Earth maps and to build family emergency plans that explicitly include the household's animals, not as an afterthought but folded into the exercise from the start.
Kelly closed the panel by returning to Mozambique, and a question a local man had once asked her while they waited for a helicopter: "Will Africa ever be able to help itself?" She used it to name something the whole two days had circled: that resilience has too often been romanticized as something communities are simply expected to keep rising from, rather than something built, deliberately, before the next crisis arrives.
What Participants Say
Eleven feedback responses came from eight countries — the Philippines, Greece, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Italy, Bangladesh, and the UK — and every respondent said they would attend another DRC event.
Participants particularly valued the practical Risk Assessment Workshop:
Wrap-up and group discussion [after risk assessment workshop]. It is very good to share thoughts and experiences.
— Participant, Thailand
[the workshop] allows us to apply what we learned from the lectures.
— Participant, Philippines
One participant captured the purpose of the summit particularly well:
The session was very practical guidance to understanding risk and implementing assessments that help us to be more proactive in the face of disasters.
— Participant, Greece
Understanding disasters and the multitude of risks is the first step toward disaster preparedness. If your organization would like to discover the next step with DRC, check out the DRC Pledge!
