Abstract
The ASEAN region is one of the most susceptible regions to climate change, with three of its countries—Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand—among those that have suffered the greatest fatalities and economic losses because of climate-related disasters. This paper reveals that the ASEAN’s environmental performance is sorely lagging other regions despite evidence of its cohesive and comprehensive efforts to mitigate emissions and build up adaptive capacity to climate-related disasters. Within the ASEAN, there exist gaps in environmental performance between each country. This suggests that increased cooperation between individual ASEAN countries is pertinent for the region to collectively combat climate change. In addition, we show that government effectiveness has a positive influence on a country’s climate performance, signifying that a government’s strong commitment to governance is necessary in the fight against climate change.
Highlights
Southeast Asia is among the regions that are most susceptible to climate change.The region has already seen its ramifications in the form of extreme weather events and heat waves, with anthropogenic causes being the main driver of climate change
We focus on the Climate Change issue category of the Ecosystem Vitality component of the environmental performance index (EPI) to investigate how the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) compares to the rest of the world in terms of climate change, which is most relevant to sustainable development goals (SDG) 13
Equation (2) examines the strength of ASEAN’s environmental performance relative to non-ASEAN countries: CCHit = β 0 + β 1 ASEANit + β 2 GDPit + ε it where CCHit refers to the climate change index of the relevant country in year t, ASEANit is an independent dummy variable which takes on a value of 1 if it is an ASEAN country, and 0 otherwise, GDPit, which serves as a control variable, refers to the natural logarithm of the relevant country’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in year t, βi ’s are the regression coefficients, and εit is an error term ~N[0, 1]
Summary
Southeast Asia is among the regions that are most susceptible to climate change. The region has already seen its ramifications in the form of extreme weather events and heat waves, with anthropogenic causes being the main driver of climate change. This paper investigates the effectiveness of ASEAN’s strategies to mitigate climate change and whether ASEAN is doing enough, with relation to the United Nations’ 13th sustainable development goal to combat climate change. This is done using data from the environmental performance index from years 1996 to 2018, as a proxy to measure progress in achieving the 13th sustainable goal. We believe that this paper provides a metric for crucial parties, such as ASEAN government bodies and working climate groups, to understand their standing in terms of environmental performance, and the crucial areas that require further efforts on the mitigation front This can serve as a checkpoint to study the ASEAN’s progress in meeting the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals since.
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