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The greater Himalaya mountain range, known as the “roof of the world,” plays a central role in the environmental wellbeing of Asia and the world. It is the source of a system of rivers that sustain fertile food-producing land – and therefore populations – across the continent. But the recent race to develop infrastructure in the region, including hydropower dams, endangers the ecosystems that flourish around these rivers, and the populations that depend on them. This panel discussion will explore the causes and effects of those environmental changes. What is driving the competitive infrastructure development in India and China? How does this affect the hydrology and ecology of Asia’s major river systems? And how will these changes affect populations, and in turn state policy, in the many downstream countries?

Ruth Gamble is an environmental, cultural and climate historian of Tibet, the Himalaya, and Asia. She is writing her third book, a history of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River. Her previous books were on the relationship between sacred geography and the reincarnation tradition (Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism) and a biography of the Third Karmapa (Master of Mahamudra). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the region’s ecological politics, literatures, and histories. She completed her PhD in Asian Studies, and taught Tibetan language studies and Asian Religions, at the Australian National University.

Santosh Nepal is a water and climate specialist, and leads the Climate and Hydrology Group, at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu. He designs and implements climate change and hydrological assessments, including for climate change projections, flood modelling and predictions, upstream-downstream linkages, and integrated water resources management. He previously worked on integrated water resource management, disaster risk reduction, and wetland related issues. He holds a PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, on mountain hydrology.

Arzan Tarapore (Moderator) is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defense Department. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

This event is co-sponsored by Center for South Asia and is part of Shorenstein APARC's fall 2021 webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia.

Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 8:00am - 9:30am (Shanghai time)

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation policies requires comprehensive assessment of the projected damages from climate change. However,  current climate policy is informed by outdated models lacking empirical grounding. In this talk, we use subnational mortality records across 40 countries to generate data-driven estimates of the global mortality consequences of climate change. We show that both extreme cold and extreme heat raise mortality rates, especially for the elderly, the poor, and populations that experience these extremes infrequently. These heterogeneous nonlinear responses to warming lead to highly differentiated projected impacts of climate change across the globe. In this talk we focus in particular on the Asia-Pacific region, where mortality risk generally rises with a warming climate, but projected damages differ substantially within and across countries. We conclude by demonstrating how these results can be used to inform local adaptation policy within an individual city, using Chengdu, China as a case study, and point to new developments in climate science that will enable future improvements in mortality risk assessment across Asia. 

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research combines economics with datasets and methodologies from remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify how environmental change and economic development shape one another. Tamma's current work focuses on climate change, water scarcity, and the use of remote sensing for global-scale environmental and socioeconomic monitoring. She is an active member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary team conducting an empirically-grounded global assessment of climate change impacts. Tamma joined the Bren School after a postdoc at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, MSc.'s in Environmental Change and Management as well as Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Lewis & Clark College.

Jiacan Yuan is an Associate Professor of Climatology at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. She is interested in understanding fundamental dynamical processes of the climate system and improving climate models, which could give us stronger predictive power and more accurate risk assessment of the changing climate. Jiacan’s current work focuses on understanding the physical processes and uncertainties in climate changes, with major emphases on compound heat-humidity extremes and sea level rise. She is also an active member of the Climate Impact Lab. Before joining Fudan University, Jiacan was an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Peking University.

 This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:30am - 8:30am (Jakarta time)

Dr. Alatas will discuss her research on promoting vaccination in Indonesia and the impact of the pandemic on Indonesia’s society and economy more generally, including on poverty, human capital, and development.

Vivi Alatas is an  economist with passion for evidence-based solutions.  She is CEO of Asakreativita, a consulting and Edtech company that she established in 2020. Formerly she was a Lead Economist of the World Bank, where she led a team of seasoned local and international economists in producing several flagship reports for national and global audiences, including ‘Targeting Poor and Vulnerable Households in Indonesia’, ‘Making Poverty Work in Indonesia’ , ‘Indonesia’s Rising Divide’, ‘Indonesia Jobs Report’ and “Aspiring Indonesia – Expanding the Middle Class”. She has presented various of these research findings to the President, Vice President, Ministers and Deputy Ministers. She also has written several journal articles on poverty, inequality and labour issues. Some of the papers were written in collaboration with Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton (who was also her advisor at Princeton).

North Carolina time: 19 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30 pm; Singapore time: 20 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30am

Viewed alongside other world regions, Southeast Asia is uniquely vulnerable to major damage by global warming. Its coastlines are lengthy and subject to searise. Its urban centers of economic and political gravity are mainly riverine or deltaic. Its agriculture requires optimal levels and rhythms of waterflow, as do its polluted main veins, the Mekong and the Irrawaddy.  In already tropical conditions, heatwaves are especially enervating.  Nor has the region escaped extreme weather events.  The ten most afflicted countries worldwide in that regard include Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.  With this background in mind, Angel Hsu and Melissa Low, two scholars with deep regional and policy knowledge will consider questions such as:  What has been and is being done, by whom, and with what chances of success?  Can currently worsening trends be reversed?  Mitigated?  Or is adaptation the sole plausible recourse?  Who will represent the interests of the unborn generations who will suffer the long-term consequences of present-day indifference and delay?  Will effective policy require authoritarian politics?  Given that the largest current and historical emitters of greenhouse gases are, respectively, China and the US, what roles should and will they play?  And how, if at all, will global versions of these questions be addressed and answered in November in Glasgow at COP26?

Angel Hsu founded and heads the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues.  Her research into the causes and consequences of climate change explores the interfacing of science and policy.  Her many publications include coverage of Malaysia, Viet Nam, and especially China.  In February 2021 she spoke on global climate trends before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, having addressed US-China climate relations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.  Illustrating Prof. Hsu’s commitment to public outreach was her selection as a TED 2018 Age of Amazement Speaker and earlier as an inaugural member of the Grist 50, an annual list of “emerging leaders” working on “fresh, real-world solutions” to the world’s “biggest challenges,” global warming included.  She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy from Yale University.

Melissa Low has published, presented, and advised on climate change in multiple forums.  She is currently researching the relative transparency of climate action and reporting in Southeast Asia.  She provides policy analyses and conducts workshops to improve understanding of the Paris Agreement and track whether countries are keeping their promises.  For that work, in 2021, she received Singapore’s EcoFriend Award and its Public Service Medal.  Having taken part in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties for many years, she is now on the steering committee that coordinates NGOs under the UNFCCC. She holds a University of Strathclyde LLM (with distinction) in Climate Change Law and Policy and an MSc in Environmental Management at the National University of Singapore, where is pursuing a PhD in geography.  Her master’s thesis on the run-up to the Paris Agreement won NUS’s Shell Best Dissertation Award.

This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Professor Mobarak will discuss his research on COVID-19 response in Bangladesh and beyond, including masking, vaccine equity, and appropriate pandemic response policies in low and middle income countries.

He will provide an overview of the coauthored MaskNorm study, a randomized-trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 that demonstrates a scalable and effective method to promote mask adoption and reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. He will also discuss efficient last-mile vaccine delivery in low-income countries and related research on the lower epidemiological and welfare value of social distancing in lower-income countries.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics.

Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE.

Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Malawi and Sierra Leone. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. For example, he is scaling and testing strategies to address seasonal poverty using migration subsidies or consumption loans in Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Mobarak is collaborating with the government of Bangladesh, NGOs and think-tanks such as BRAC and BIGD, the major Bangladeshi telecom providers, Innovations for Poverty Action, UNDP, other economists, epidemiologists, computer scientists, and public health researchers to devise evidence-based COVID response strategies for Bangladesh and for other developing countries. The approach and results have been covered by BBC, Foreign Policy, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and media in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, among others.  The work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Givewell.org, the Global Innovation Fund, and Yale Macmillan Center.

Co-sponsored by

 

This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program's 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Three prominent demographers discuss China's demographic change with insights from the seventh national census. Topics include the pace of urbanization, the more balanced sex ratio, increasing educational attainment, population aging, potential impacts of the pandemic, and recently announced changes in family planning and retirement policies.

Wang Feng is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and an adjunct professor of sociology and demography at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He has done extensive research on global social and demographic changes, comparative population and social history, and social inequality, with a focus on China. He is the author of multiple books, and his research articles have been published in venues including Population and Development Review, Demography, Science, The Journal of the Economics of Aging, The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Journal, and International Migration Review. He has served on expert panels for the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and as a senior fellow and the director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. His work and views have appeared in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, Economist, NPR, CNN, BBC, and others.

Cai Yong's research focuses on China's one-child policy and its implications for fertility and social policies. The one-child policy, engineered to control China's population growth by restricting fertility to one child per couple, has been controversial for many reasons, including the policy's questionable demographic and economic assumptions, the ethical concerns regarding direct state intrusion into family matters, and its negative social and demographic impacts. Cai's work has contributed to an emerging consensus on China's fertility change and the impact of the one-child policy. Specifically, his work shows that: China's fertility has dropped to a level well below the replacement; the demographic impact of the one-child policy was modest, much less than the government's claim of 400 million averted births; socioeconomic development played a critical role in driving China's fertility decline; and the socioeconomic impacts of low fertility and population aging are substantial. The consensus on these issues, to which Cai contributed, provided the empirical and scientific foundation that persuaded the Chinese government to end the three-decade-long policy.

Cai continues to monitor China's fertility in the post-one-child era, but with a new focus on international comparisons on sustained low fertility and population aging, both from a micro perspective about individual responses and family dynamics and from a macro perspective about social welfare regimes and public transfers.

Li Shuzhuo is currently University Distinguished Professor of Population and Development Policy Studies, Honorary Director of the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, and consulting professor at the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University. He is a member of the Social Sciences Committee of the Ministry of Education of China. His research is focused on population and social development as well as public policies in contemporary China, including population policies and development, gender imbalance and sustainable social development, aging and health, migration and integration.