Bøger i Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research serien

The city of Leh is located in the high mountain desert of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas and access to water has always been limited there. In recent years, the town has experienced high rates of urbanisation on the one hand, and tourist numbers have increased exponentially on the other, which has implications for the water supply of the people living there. Through several years of on-site research, challenges on various levels were documented and current governance approaches were analysed. This research forms the basis for future approaches to sustainable development.

There is a need of strengthening the global and local response to cope with the threat of climate change and adverse effects of rising anthropogenic activities in the mountain ecosystem. This book provides an up-to-date and comprehensive scientific and technical knowledge based on climate and land cover change impact assessment, adaptation and mitigation strategies in the Indian Himalayan watershed. The text updates the understanding scientific analysis to promote evidence-based policy formulation at regional and local levels. It can be used as reference materials with regards to climate and land cover change for those new learners interested in the mountainous region. This comprehensive book covers a wide range of potential research areas including climate change scenarios, science and its applications, adaptation to climate change-theory and assessment, water resources, agriculture, forest, biodiversity, and ecosystems, indigenous knowledge etc.

This monograph examines contemporary environmental challenges facing Nepal, this landlocked country¿s representativeness in the wider South Asian context is both distinct and generalizable. In large part, this is because of its extremes of physiographical structure- plains, hill ranges, mountainous massifs - and wide range of altitudinal terrains, which represent and replicate South Asian and East Asian continental conditions differing as markedly as humid tropical lowlands, sub-tropical hill ranges and temperate to sub-arctic mountainous environments. Associated forest regimes, in which deforestation and reforestation patterns have evolved in recent times, and differing densities of settlement and cleared agricultural landscapes in each of these altitudinal zones, add to the environmental diversity of Nepal. Associated fauna and exotic species are in various states of endangerment especially Bengal tigers, one horned rhinos, wild elephants, crocodile, musk deer, and peasants, to name a few- so that their forested and mountainous habitats as ¿Wild Life Reserves¿ also deserve our attention, and are featured in this monograph¿s remit.

This multidisciplinary work analyses challenges to sustainable development amidst rapidly changing climate in the world's largest delta - the Sundarbans.

This book examines in detail the health of India's Haora River, which is of vital importance as the lifeline of Agartala, the Capital City of Tripura.

Creative Industries and Urban Spatial Structure

Paradoxically, China's debased environment, a legacy of wasteful and anthropocentric central planning, could be more open to improvement-by fiat-than that of other nations. This book details key problem areas from water to air quality and energy resources.

This study combines economic cost-benefit analysis and behavioral models of resource use to generate a framework for sustainable groundwater-irrigated agriculture, deploying datasets from arid southern Pakistan to illustrate the dangers of overextraction.

This book provides insight into creative industries and spaces in Shanghai, the fastest-growing megacity in China and the center of modern economic development. This spatial phenomenon is examined through analysis of dynamics, networks and implications.

North-East India, comprising the seven contiguous states around Assam, is a relatively unknown, yet fascinating region. This book offers a glimpse into the region's past and a comprehensive picture of its physical environment, people, resources and economy.

This book elaborates on the Khazan ecosystems of Goa, India. They are endemic and heritage ecosystems of Goa and ultimately reservoirs of history and heritage. Using the example of the Khazan lands, the book analyzes and comments on traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous technology.

Using India as a case study, this book identifies the spatial aspects of norms through which concepts of the ideal river and the deficient river in need of control are created. Examines different subjective stances arising from the same body of expertise.

The book presents a comprehensive overview, including statistics for the ice cover, glacier mass balance and dynamics, glacierized landscapes, rock glaciers, water resources and environmental hazards.

This book discusses the impact of climate change on agriculture, the inclusion of the agriculture sectors in climate change negotiations, cost and opportunities for agricultural projects through such international climate change regimes as the Kyoto Protocol.

This book is the first to present a regional analysis of climate change and human health, focusing on geographically and socio-economically distinct countries of South and Southeast Asia.

The studies in this volume provide an ethnography of a plantation frontier in central Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on the expertise of both natural scientists and social scientists, the key focus is the process of commodification of nature that has turned the local landscape into anthropogenic tropical forests. Analysing the transformation of the space of mixed landscapes and multiethnic communities¿driven by trade in forest products, logging and the cultivation of oil palm¿the contributors explore the changing nature of the environment, multispecies interactions, and the metabolism between capitalism and nature. The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment.Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements¿commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia.Chapters ¿Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier¿ and ¿Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene¿ are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book shows how social impact assessment (SIA), which emerged barely five decades ago, as a way to anticipate and manage potentially negative social impacts of building dams, power stations, urban infrastructure, highways, industries, mining and other development projects, is now widely in use as a planning tool, especially in developed countries. Although SIA has still not gained much acceptance among development planners in Asia, the situation is gradually changing. In India, SIA initially mandated as a policy guideline in 2007 is now a legal requirement. SIA in China has also recently become obligatory for certain types of development projects. Bangladesh, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are other Asian countries that provide examples from a variety of externally funded projects illustrating the use of social impact analysis in project planning to improve development outcomes. With contributions from an array of leading experts, this book is a valuable resource on SIA, indispensable for policymakers, planners, and practitioners in government, international development agencies, private-sector industry, private banks, consultants, teachers, researchers and students of social sciences and development studies, also NGOs everywhere, not in Asia alone.

By emphasizing on the Pamir region a comprehensive overviewof path-dependent and recent developments in a remote mountain region isprovided in this book.

This book focuses on irrigation sources together with water management for agricultural development in Uttar Pradesh state of India. Being the most populous state of the country, it bears a burden of feeding about 199 million people of which major section relies on agriculture for their subsistence. This study makes comparison in the growth trends in the irrigated area, crop land use patterns and crop productivity at the district level in different periods of time. The book emphasizes on irrigation water management to optimize crop yields in order to increase Water Productivity of crops in low productivity regions of the state applying suitable technology.This book appeals to researchers and students in geography and planning working on the topics of agriculture as well as irrigation and water management aspects.

Water Civilization: From Yangtze to Khmer Civilizations comprises three major topics: 1) Discovery of the origin of rice agriculture and the Yangtze River civilization in southern China was mainly based on investigation of the Chengtoushan archaeological site, the earliest urban settlement in East Asia.

While the Damodar River isn't an exceptional tropical river, nor does it feature classic examples of river control structures, it is unusual and worthy of study due to the fact that nowhere else in the tropical world have riverine sandbars been used as a resource base as well as for permanent settlements.

This book explores the multi-dimensional asymmetries of scale, time, and directions in the large dam controversy with a regional focus on Asia, especially on India and China.

This edited volume covers the multiple changes concerning urban governance in the course of the progressive transformation of the Pearl River Delta mega-urban region in China.

This book is the first to present a regional analysis of climate change and human health, focusing on geographically and socio-economically distinct countries of South and Southeast Asia.

By emphasizing on the Pamir region a comprehensive overviewof path-dependent and recent developments in a remote mountain region isprovided in this book.

Assessing the Social Impact of Development Projects

This book examines social and natural environmental changes in present-day Laos and presents a new research framework for environmental studies from an interdisciplinary point of view.

Malaria is one of the most widespread and devastating infectious diseases in the world. Because of the magnitude of the associated fata- ties, development experts consider malaria a 'silent tsunami,' comparing its death toll to the Indian Ocean tsunami (IOT) that ravaged several countries of South and Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004.