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Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

Today, 54% of the world’s population live in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Major cities and municipalities in the region rely either fully or partially on groundwater. Four highly relevant Asian cities (Bangkok, Bandung, Ho Chi Minh and Lahore) were selected which bear groundwater dependency in the range of...

Both hydropower dams and global warming pose threats to freshwater fish diversity. While the extent of global warming may be reduced by a shift towards energy generation by large dams in order to reduce fossil-fuel use, such dams profoundly modify riverine habitats. Furthermore, the threats posed by dams and global warming will interact: for...

This study provides a computationally-simple method to annually update existing national forest maps and model future forest change. It involves integrating national forest maps and global tree cover maps to monitor annual forest change, and then modeling future change by linear extrapolation of the historical trend.

Biofuels are often presented as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, however, empirical analysis that is widely reported in the literature shows that biofuel production can have negative environmental and social impacts. The potential for these negative impacts can be avoided through careful planning of biofuel feedstock...

A new method was developed for mapping forest, agricultural, and urban land cover using remote sensing imagery. It is designed to better detect small land cover objects (e.g. small forest or agricultural patches) and monitor their change (e.g. fine-scale deforestation) using freely-available satellite imagery.

This study evaluated the effects of image pansharpening on Vegetation Indices (VIs) in an agricultural area of Thailand, and found that pansharpening was able to downscale single-date and multi-temporal VI data without introducing significant distortions. The downscaled (15m resolution) VI values can be used for estimating above-ground biomass...

This publication is one of the major outputs of the Water Environment Partnership in Asia (WEPA).WEPA aims to strengthen water environmental governance in Asia through the collection and dissemination of information and capacity development of relevant stakeholders in partnership with eleven countries in the region, namely Cambodia, China...