Environmental Change, Vulnerability and Governance: Projects
- Air Quality
Raw coal and biomass, the most polluting of all fuels, make up more than three-quarters of the total burned by Asia’s population—both urban and rural. The burning of these fuels is increasingly credited with playing a major role in damaging public health and in global warming. The health, social, and economic costs of pollution in Asia exceeds $75 billion annually, and the outlook is for a doubling of some of these energy-related pollutants within a quarter-century. There is an urgent need to analyze air pollution related risks that societies face, to quantify them, and to examine their policy significance. There is also a dire need to develop tools that can help decision makers at all levels prioritize their problems and find cost-effective solutions for improving public health.
- Water Quality and Quantity
Water is already a scarce resource in many parts of Asia. The problem is likely to worsen, based on current trends in water use coupled with projected increases in demand due to rapid economic growth. Factors contributing to the degradation of water resources include excessive abstractions from surface and groundwater sources; increasing water pollution from untreated/partially treated waste discharges from municipalities, industrial and mining operations; loss and encroachment of sensitive wetlands; unsustainable land use; and loss of aquatic biodiversity due to damaged ecosystems from altered flow regimes. We seek to develop capacity to deal with one or more of these issues.
- Environmental Risk Management
Environmental management has always been and will likely always be characterized by decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Experience and research indicate that effective management requires a new kind of collaboration between scientists and decision makers or managers, one which assumes a continuous, two-way flow of information and periodic evaluations and policy adjustments based on new insights that are gained from the field. We seek to develop capacity to assess vulnerability and to explore options for enhancing the resilience of governments, communities, businesses and natural resources in the region; exploring the environmental, economic and societal consequences of changes in the availability of freshwater and other resources; and the roles of institutions and information systems in improving the region’s risk management capabilities. Countries in the Asia Pacific region urgently need to analyze the options, risks and uncertainties in mitigating and adapting to environmental change and variability.
- Natural Disasters
The majority of global natural disasters occur in the Asia Pacific region including weather related and geologic disasters. Year-to-year climate variability (e.g., El Niño and monsoons) and extreme events (e.g., droughts and storms) already pose significant challenges for key economic sectors in the region including agriculture and tourism, public health and safety, and critical water resources and will continue to do so in the future. Scientists predict that future impacts of climate change will also be particularly acute in Asia Pacific countries especially those with vulnerable coasts, and whose future economic plans depend on climate-sensitive resources (e.g., beaches, coral reefs, fisheries) or activities (e.g., tourism, agriculture). Millions of people are at risk from geologic disasters in this geologically unstable part of the world. We seek to develop a framework for multi-hazards risk management that will contribute to the development of sustainable communities in the Asia-Pacific region.
- Environmental Economics and Policy
It is now almost universally accepted that the environment is not a separate entity from the economy. Changes in one affect the other. Thus, economy and the environment must be fully integrated in decision-making. In this context, environmental economics has become an indispensable toolkit of decision making: no sensible environmental policy can be made without undertaking sound economic analysis. Research in this area focuses on design and analysis of market-based environmental policy instruments, in particular environmental taxation, emissions trading, and clean development mechanisms; examining environmental implications of international trade and investment policies; undertaking vigorous economic model-based analysis of energy, climate and environmental policies; investigating the roles of the development, deployment and transfer of environmentally friendly energy technologies and the efficient use of energy and resources in promoting sustainable development; and studying appropriate governance and institutional frameworks for engaging all major economies of the world in mitigating climate risks.
- Land-use and Land-cover Change
Land-use and land-cover change are widely considered as sources and sinks of biogeochemical elements and biological diversity. Human driving forces of land-use/cover change include demographic factors such as population size, growth rate, and migration; cultural values; technology; level of affluence and economic structure; and political systems. A better understanding of how these factors affect land-use decisions and derive land-cover changes is critical for projecting future patterns of land use and future states of land cover. At the East-West Center we are particularly interested in linking social science data collected at household and community levels with remotely sensed and other spatial data to study both the driving forces of land-use/cover change as well as the impacts these changes have on deforestation, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and local communities.
- Spatial Information Services
The spatial information lab endeavors to develop and increase the use of remotely sensed data, geographic information systems (GIS), and global positioning system (GPS) technology for detecting and evaluating environmental status and change in Asia and the Pacific, including Hawaii. Research and services include using remotely sensed imagery for monitoring environmental change in the region, integrating socioeconomic information into the analysis of regional environmental change, and training graduate students, visiting researchers, and East-West Center staff and University of Hawaii faculty and students in aspects of image processing, GIS, GPS, spatial statistics and the potential applications of these tools and techniques for environmental monitoring. Fostering collaborative research efforts among these groups and building local, regional, and national capacities for community-based resource management at international sites are important components of spatial information services as well.
