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The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XII, 2020

Following IPCC5, the Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015.
Under this Agreement, each participating country sets a voluntary target for
reducing omissions, and will be encouraged to steadily increase these targets.

All Southeast Asian countries pledged to enter the agreement. All countries
were required to set initial “intended” targets for the year 2030. These were
done quickly (my summaries from UNFCCC, 2020).

Laos. No numeric target (as current emissions are small).
Cambodia. No numeric target.
Myanmar. No numeric target, as the data available are unreliable.
Philippines. Reduce emissions by 70% against business-as-usual.
Indonesia. Reduce emissions by 29% against business-as-usual.
Thailand. Reduce emissions by 20% against business-as-usual.
Vietnam. Reduce emissions by 8% against business-as-usual.
Malaysia. Reduce emission intensity (i.e., relative to GDP) by 45% over
2005.

In most cases, the main strategies are renewable energy sources and
forestation.

The next round of IPCC reports is due in 2021-22 (www.ipcc.ch/reports/).
The first technical report, on land, appeared in August 2019. This shows that
the land surface temperature is increasing nearly twice as fast as the atmosphere
(UN-IPCC, 2019: 5). This is resulting in more heatwaves, droughts, and
desertification; and also in more extreme rainfall events. Four of the region’s
cities (Jakarta, Manila, HCMC, and Bangkok) are at most risk from sea-level rise,
but not a great risk if the rise is within the projection of around 70 centimeters
(Englander 2012; johnenglander.net/blog/).

The research on Southeast Asia still lags behind other regions. This
report forecasts “unprecedented climate conditions” in tropical and sub-tropical
regions without any detail. It states that “the tropics and subtropics are
projected to be most vulnerable to crop yield decline” (UN-IPCC, 2019: 17) but,
in a massive literature survey, references no studies on Southeast Asia (UN-IPCC,
2019: 5-24-5).

In sum, as of about five years ago, the state of knowledge on the impact
of climate change on Southeast Asia can be summed like this:

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