Climate adaptation in Asia : knowledge gaps and research issues in South East Asia; full report of the South East Asia team

This study identified major areas where locally led research can contribute to policy and implementation programmes for adaptation, particularly as they relate to the poor and other vulnerable communities. While significant research has emerged on mitigating climate change impacts, these studies have focused on technical interventions, rather than complex planned and autonomous adaptive responses to factors that contribute to people’s vulnerability. Comprehensive national plans on adaptation to climate change impacts are still only in preparatory and planning stages in all countries of Southeast Asia. Adaptation is inextricably bound to multiple economic, environmental and political stresses, social vulnerabilities and differentiated adaptive capacities of people

Peri-urbanization and environmental issues in mega-urban regions

One clear pattern, and a major component of rapid urbanization unfolding in middle-income developing countries in the Southeast Asian region, is the development of particular mega-urban regions whose larger parts comprise peri-urban landscapes surrounding traditional city cores. Often regarded as transition zones, these areas are today host to environmental problems that are in many ways distinct from those that are typically found in the city centre or in more remote rural hinterlands. Their characteristics and dynamics are distinct in two senses: first, they constitute a set or chain of environmental outcomes directly resulting from, or linked to, transitional changes and the mixing of urban and rural resource uses; second, they structure a large gap and inequality in basic urban environmental liveability between the peri-urban area and the urban region city core

Generating vulnerability to floods: Poor urban migrants and the state in Metro Manila, Philippines

This chapter examines internal migration in Malabon City, part of the Metro Manila mega-urban region in the Philippines, where low-income migrants occupy risky flood-prone areas. It explores factors underlying settlement in obviously high-risk areas and the resource structure that constrains the urban poor from doing otherwise. The chapter assesses the core orientation of the city\u27s disaster preparedness program, which focuses on relocation of migrants, but with limited attention paid to patterns of mobility and livelihood strategies. Interventions thus fail to prevent relocated poor migrants from returning after flooding episodes or new waves of migrants from occupying vacated spaces. The generation of vulnerability to flooding disasters for poor and low-income migrants continues as an accretive process. This case study shows that vulnerability to flood hazards should not be seen purely as a function of biophysical and geographic variations in exposure to the natural stressor of flooding caused by extreme precipitation