Publications

The expansion of the online food services (collectively referred to as ‘OFS’) sector has been accelerating at high rates worldwide over the last few years. This sector is widely acknowledged, especially by urban consumers, for making life more convenient. During the strict lockdown following the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the OFS sector saw...

• Since its inception, ASEAN has had a vision of an integrated, sustainable, harmonious, peaceful, and productive region, with its “One Vision, One Identity, One Community”. • The three complementary communities, APSC, AEC, and ASCC, all include aspects of the future environmental conditions and quality of life desired for all ASEAN people, aligned...

• The drivers of resource consumption are population growth and economic development, leading to unsustainable consumption and production in the ASEAN region. • Increased consumption will lead to higher material extraction and processing. The current model of resource consumption has a linear flow (production→consumption→waste) and will lead to...

This report comprehensively reviewed the state and trends of the environment, the pressures on it and the drivers of those pressures, and the national and regional initiatives in place to address environmental concerns, using the DPSIR framework, and provided an overall outlook for the ASEAN environment. New elements, especially the SDGs, Paris...

● Many environmental responses tackle the impacts that appear at the end of a long chain of logic, such as premature deaths from air pollution, but they rarely address the underlying “drivers” of change. ● In the ASEAN region, these drivers include economic strategies that are geared towards creating an ASEAN economic community, continued...

• Climate change is already causing serious negative impacts in the region. In the future, extreme weather and sea level rise will cause mounting economic costs in terms of damage to health, infrastructure, and food security. • ASEAN Member States (AMS) have a variety of policies and responses to climate change adaptation and disaster risk...

• The ASEAN region is one of the most biodiverse in the world on land, in freshwater and in the ocean. • Drivers that underlie pressures on biodiversity in AMS include economic incentives that promote consumption and, hence, land-use change. These drivers are challenges to achieving SDGs 14 and 15 on conserving marine and terrestrial biodiversity...

▪ Remarkable progress has been made to improve access to safe and clean drinking water over the last 20 years; however, water degradation caused by poor sanitation and hygiene services, low water-use efficiency for agriculture, and lack of appropriate domestic wastewater treatment systems are still common challenges observed in many ASEAN Member...

• Except for land-linked Lao PDR, the remaining ASEAN Member States (AMS) are bordered by seas. Those seas, however, are under increasing direct and indirect pressure from human interference, including the preference for many forms of development in the region’s coastal zones and islands. • Aquaculture is rapidly replacing overexploited capture...

• As ASEAN increasingly transitions away from its agrarian traditions and becomes a core part of the global supply chain, improved environmental management of chemicals and waste is imperative. • Manufacturing is now a major contributor to AMS' gross domestic product (GDP) and exports but too many outdated factories in some developing ASEAN...