Environmental change in Southeast Asia: causes and consequences
Dr. Louis Lebel
GCTE Core Project Office, CSIRO Division of Wildlife & Ecology, PO Box 84, Lyneham, ACT 2602, Australia. Tel: 61 6 242 1619. Fax: 61 6 241 2362. Email:llebel@dataserv.com.au.
Abstract of paper presented at the conference Environmental Change and Vulnerability: Lessons from Vietnam and the Indochina Region, Hanoi, Vietnam, April 4-5th 1998.
For the past couple of decades, many parts of the Southeast Asia region have undergone rapid social, economic and environmental transformations and, more recently, economic problems. Industrialisation, urbanisation and high rates of population and economic growth, together with the ongoing modifications to coastal areas and tropical rainforests, make the Southeast Asia region a "hot spot" from both sustainable development and global change perspectives.
The issue of rapid environmental change, its causes and consequences, in Southeast Asia offers a good opportunity for the Southeast Asian Regional Committee for START (SARCS) to develop an Integrated Study of the human driving forces and implications of environmental change. The thrust of the Study is "living with global change" in a sustainable way, and focussing on the close interconnection between sustainable (and unsustainable) development and global change feedbacks.
The main goal of the SARCS integrated study, therefore, is to describe, understand, integrate and predict large-scale environmental changes, the natural and socio-economic factors that drive them, and their consequences for the sustainable development and management of the humid tropical marine, coastal and terrestrial ecosystems of Southeast Asia, with the primary focus on the coastal zones and continental shelf seas. This goal encompasses the full range of processes which impact on the coastal zone, including those which occur in terrestrial ecosystems higher up the catchments. The Study's overall goal is also aimed at contributing to an understanding of the role of Southeast Asia in the Earth system.
The Integrated Study will be based on a co-ordinated set of experimental, observational and modelling studies involving various ongoing and planned regional research programmes. The study through focussing on priority issues of the Southeast Asia region will contribute to the research effort of the international global change research programmes. The Science Plan aims to provide a well defined and scientifically rational overall framework for the Study so that the large number of individual, contributing studies can be designed and implemented in a co-ordinated way to provide a coherent regional understanding.
In this presentation, I will outline key features of the Science Plan, and argue that meeting the formidable policy challenges posed by large-scale environmental change will require a higher level of regional and international co-operation between the research and policy communities.