The Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province caused tremendous losses to China and drew widespread concern from nations not just in Asia but other parts of the world as well. Several countries, including Japan and Russia, sent emergency rescue and medical teams to the disaster area while the international community provided relief materials as well as cash donations.

Disaster relief has become a common humanitarian cause of the whole world as the era of increasing interdependency calls for an international disaster relief and reduction system that covers the whole of Asia.

Natural disasters never respect national boundaries, nor do they observe social systems, nationalities, religions or ideologies. For quite a long period of time after World War II, however, international cooperation in disaster relief largely took the form of bilateral aid. Though international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNESCO and institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have played an important role in organizing, coordinating and directly participating in many international emergency relief efforts over the decades, an extensive international disaster relief system was nowhere to be found until the mid-1990s, when international cooperation in disaster relief led by the UN finally headed toward constructing such a system.

In 1994 the first World conference on disaster reduction, organized by the UN, was held in Yokohama, Japan, and put forward a "Yokohama Strategy" aimed at prevention before disasters occur and building a strong society afterwards. The concept symbolized international efforts in disaster prevention and relief began moving toward systemization.

On January 18, 2005, the second world conference on disaster reduction began in Kobe, Japan, as relief efforts were in full swing for tsunami-hit nations such as Indonesia and the host nation Japan marked the 10th anniversary of the Hanshin earthquake. Almost 4,000 representatives of 168 countries and regions attended the gathering.