Southeast Asia

With a gleaming skyline, robust public transportation system, and high per capita income, Singapore is often held up as a paragon of development that other Southeast Asian countries seek to emulate. However, a closer look at Singapore’s climate commitments and non-state actors suggests that while Singapore presents a pathway for climate mitigation, the island nation still has scope to be more ambitious and those looking to follow in its path should take note.

2014 figures indicate that Malaysia is ranked third in the region in terms of CO2 emissions per capita (8.00 metric tons) after Brunei Darussalam and Singapore. This is almost double the world average and is a clear indication that Malaysia’s commitment to reduce emissions is essential for the sustainable future of the region.

The 2019 Indonesian presidential candidates, Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, squared off during a televised debate on February 17. While both have mentioned climate change in their vision and mission documents, none of them cared enough to elaborate on that during the debate.

At the time of the 1975 Revolution, when the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party came to power, the country had one large dam of 15 megawatts or more. In September 2018, Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said Laos has “about over 50 hydropower dams”.

The 2018 collapse of a Lao dam is far from an old, closed file stored in dusty archives, but that is the rather strange, surreal feeling one gets when searching online for updates about the disaster and its aftermath in this Southeast Asian country of 7 million people.

This year’s United Nations climate conference wrapped up this month in Katowice, Poland with just enough progress to make the Paris Agreement operational. Yet too few countries stepped up in response to a year of extremes and a slew of reports, all highlighting the widening gap between what science demands and what is actually being acted upon.

Solidarity works involving communities from two different countries, Indonesia and Germany is a result of a collaborative work facilitated by usage of media technology. Social movements are no longer only read as a local entity with specific actors and issues but can be read within the framework of engagement with other actors and issues, both at local and international levels.

Coal is now more expensive than renewable energy – and while this is good news for the climate, it’s bad news for developing countries who have invested in coal. Renato Redentor Constantino looks at how Japan and Korea are divesting, and the IMF’s opinion on stranded assets.

Southeast Asia is urbanizing rapidly, with cities in the region growing five times faster than in other regions of the world. As in most of Asia, urban growth in the region in the coming decades is projected to occur mainly in smaller urban centres. These cities, however are often highly vulnerable to the risks posed by climate change, particularly floods, droughts, and sea-level rise, because of their geographical locations.

Two narratives dominate the debate on the expansion of the oil palm cultivation. The first narrative focuses on the destruction of forest or agroforestry systems and their transformation into oil palm monoculture plantations. The second narrative shows how oil palm cultivation improves the livelihoods of rural households by increasing their income and nutrition. Both narratives are supported by scientific evidence, and they need to be thought together when aiming to improve the ecological and economical sustainability in the production areas.