Groundwater offers smallholder farmers in the lowlands of Lao PDR opportunities to diversify cropping beyond wet season paddy and thus enhance their livelihoods while reducing climate risks. This chapter focuses on evaluating existing and specifically developed groundwater irrigation options on the Vientiane Plain, and framing the findings around...
A city region is a unit comprising an urban core and surrounding peri-urban and, occasionally, rural areas. The Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere (R-CES) proposed by the Japanese government is a guiding approach for policymaking that prioritises the harmonised flow of resources between urban and rural areas, low-carbon society, circular...
This technical report elaborates on the methodology and results from the case study conducted in Case Study: Phoukhoun River Basin Pilot, Lao PDR. These guidelines will help stakeholders to conduct landslide vulnerability and risk assessments by integrating climate change projections. The technical report should be read along with the related...
This summary report presents the results of the technical analysis of the third biennial update report of Thailand, conducted by a team of technical experts in accordance with the modalities and procedures contained in the annex to decision 20/CP.19. The author at IGES (Chisa Umemiya) served as one of the co-leads.
The crisis ignited by COVID-19 has transformed the volume and composition of waste generation and requires a dynamic response from policy makers. This study selected Bangkok as a case study to semi-quantitatively examine the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on consumer-generated food and plastic waste by examining changes in lifestyles and...
Ensuring sustainable consumption and production (SCP) patterns is an important task for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 12 by 2030. To facilitate international and domestic collaboration toward regional SCP, we developed a collaborative workshop method to generate and structure ideas about consumption and production (CP) patterns and...
Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...
Forest conservation is a key component of multilateral environmental agreements related to biodiversity conservation (Convention on Biological Diversity; CBD)) and climate change (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; UNFCCC), and ambitious national commitments are essential to the implementation of these agreements. To understand the...
Irrigated agriculture has become an important focus of the Government of Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) for addressing poverty alleviation, food security and climate change. Most irrigation systems to date have relied upon surface water, limiting irrigation development to areas close to streams, rivers and reservoirs. To address this gap, a...
Today, 54% of the world’s population live in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Major cities and municipalities in the region rely either fully or partially on groundwater. Four highly relevant Asian cities (Bangkok, Bandung, Ho Chi Minh and Lahore) were selected which bear groundwater dependency in the range of...