Author : Sajise, Percy

Summary : The challenge is to look for solutions. Experts can consider landscape or land use planning, agroecosystem diversity maintenance, or finding effective indicators for sustainable development as potential tools to decouple GDP growth from environmental deterioration. Today’s trends on natural resources and environment in Southeast Asia seem to show that high GDP equals high environmental deterioration.

To decouple high GDP growth from environmental deterioration, policymakers, together with various sectors need to constitute working groups at various hierarchical levels from the grassroots to the policy arena.

These working groups should respectively cover climate change mitigation and adaptation; reduced emission from deforestation; biodiversity, livelihood and food security; coastal resource management; water and land resources; sustainable education; health risk; and policy.