Tackling Regional Climate Change Impacts and Food Security Issues: A Critical Analysis across ASEAN, PIF, and SAARC

Abstract

Climate change and food security issues are multi-faceted and transcend across national boundaries. Therefore, this paper begins with the premise that regional organizations are optimally positioned to address climate change and food security issues while actively engaging global partners to slow down or reverse current trajectories. However, the potential of regional organizations to play a central role in mitigating these vital concerns has not been realized. In this paper, we focus on three regional organizations—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and set out to investigate the multifaceted obstacles that impede regional organizations’ ability to effectively cope with these problems. We qualitatively review the efficacy of policies and examine the connections between politico-economic processes that affect the development, cooperation, and execution of regional policies. In doing so, we review regional policies using five key criteria: (i) planning, (ii) implementation, (iii) cooperation, (iv) legal obligation and (v) international contribution. Our findings suggest that regional organizations face fundamental problems in the implementation of extensive policies due to the lack of cooperation and legal obligation between member nation-states that stems from fundamental prioritization of national development agendas over regional cooperation.

Agricultural Climate Change Adaptation in Kebumen, Central Java, Indonesia

“…Problems of food security and hunger will potentially break out due to the combination of the two factors above. In addition, the Southeast Asian region is the region that is most vulnerable to climate change due to high climate risk and low socio-economic capacity [19]. The livelihood structures of low-income communities in Southeast Asia, which are dominated by farmers, will potentially be severely affected.…”

The Context: COVID-19, Global Development Agendas and Tourism

“…Document and critical discourse analysis (D&CDA) (Mendes et al 2020), as well as meta-analysis, were other methods used in analysing data (Asatani et al 2020). The D&CDA has been successfully applied to research climate change Islam and Kieu 2020) and REDD+ regimes (Mbatu 2020), both of which have direct linkages to the tourism value chains. Both D&CDA and meta-analysis methods were also applied in studying sports tourism (Jiménez-García et al 2020) and the understanding of environmental perception in tourism (Shi and Sun 2020).…”

Climate change and disease in plant communities

“…Much has been written about the likely impact of climate change on disease incidence and severity, epidemic frequency, and its spatial distribution in agriculture [2][3][4]. Such studies make a range of epidemiological assumptions based on observations of current disease triangles (host-pathogen-environment) and predictions of climate change.…”