The Asia Pacific zone covers 45 countries and 57% of all the disasters in the Asia Pacific are hydro-metrological in nature. Increasing climate risk threatens hard-earned development gains. A strategy for dealing with this is to better understand and pre-empt climate related hazards through systematic use of climate information  at different time scales. This can occur on timescales of hours, days, weeks, months and even years ahead of time.  Challenges currently abound for practitioners trying to apply climate information. Increased interaction between end users such as humanitarians and information providers is required to ensure more user friendly, needs driven climate information so that ultimately lives can be saved and injuries can be limited. Published in 2010.