Research Database

Building resilience is a critical response to climate change. Developing countries are the most vulnerable to climate change, yet planning rarely considers how broader community development interventions can enhance resilience and support development. One solution is resilience assessment. However, few assessment frameworks exist that are sufficiently simple to empower communities to build resilience and take ownership of adaptation efforts. This article provides an example of a 27-question framework applied with two Cambodian communes (communities) to assess and understand trends in resilience over time. It is structured around community development outcomes of economic development, environmental quality, infrastructure that matches demands, community self-reliance and capacity to adapt to climate change; it also assesses how inputs and planning contribute to these outcomes. Longitudinal analyses reveal improvements over time driven primarily by commodity values. However, the sustainability of some of these improvements is questionable given volatile commodity markets and land degradation. Oversensitivity in the assessment is acknowledged as awareness increases over time, which can be conflated with poor performance. Maladaptive pathways may be unavoidable without building resilience by attending to broader community development issues, e.g. psychological wellbeing and education on alternative livelihoods. This article makes a significant contribution to community resilience by providing a simple resilience assessment framework that has demonstrably empowered communes to adapt to change. It is novel in the use of assessment design and process principles that build reflection on the drivers of resilience and development. Critical issues remain in the power dynamics of aid dependence, weakening of family bonds and patron-client relationships that affect resilience building in Cambodia.

Production of upland crops such as maize, cassava, soybean, mungbean, peanut and sesame contribute importantly to Cambodia’s economy and food security, especially for those who live in the upland areas found in almost every province of Cambodia. The upland farmers are highly vulnerable to climate variability and climate change due to low adaptive capacity and […]

This work is proposed to examine the relationships between energy consumption, biodiversity, and economic growth for China and five countries in the Indochina Peninsula, which are Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, who also belong to Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, for the time span from 1991 to 2014. For this purpose, this work adopted autoregressive distributed lag […]

This study aims to quantify the incidence of energy poverty in Cambodia and its potential impact on the social wellbeing of the people of Cambodia. The notion of energy poverty of a household is not well understood in the context of literature as it may refer to either ‘energy poor’ or ‘economically poor’ condition of the household. This study defines energy poverty in terms of lack of accessibility and/ or affordability of energy, which may cause the deprivation of a household and affect its wellbeing. The study uses the latest Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey Data 2015 (CSES 2015) to investigate the impacts of energy poverty on the health, education and earning opportunities of the households. The findings of the study suggest that energy poverty of a household is strongly associated with the type of fuel used and low consumption of unaffordable clean energy by the household. The resulting impacts of energy poverty on the wellbeing of households are enormous. Energy poor households have a higher probability of its members suffering from respiratory problems, spending more on medical care, having a higher dropout rate from schools and lower earning opportunities than the households without energy poverty. Based on its findings, the study suggests an urgent need of policy measures focusing on provision of clean and affordable energy to poor households to reduce / eliminate energy poverty in Cambodia.

This paper studies an optimal design of grid topology and integrated photovoltaic (PV) and centralized battery energy storage considering techno-economic aspect in low voltage distribution systems for urban area in Cambodia. This work aims at searching for an optimal topology including size of the battery energy storage by two different methods over the planning study of 15 years. Firstly, the shortest path algorithm (SPA) and first-fit bin-packing algorithm (FFBPA) are used to find out the topology which minimize the line and the load balancing. Secondly, mixed integer quadratically constrained programming (MIQCP) algorithms are developed to search for a topology which minimize conductor use and the load balancing improvement. Next, Genetic algorithm is developed to size the maximum PV peak power connected into LV network with respected to voltage and current constraints. Then, the size of battery energy storage procedure is established in order to eliminate the reverse power flow going on medium voltage (MV) grid and to improve the autonomous operation time of system. A discounted cost method is used to evaluate the solutions for different methods. Lastly, an urban area in Cambodia is chosen as a case study in this paper. Simulation results confirm the proposed method in this research.

The Tonle Sap is the most fertile and diverse freshwater ecosystem in Southeast Asia, receiving nurturing water flows from the Mekong and its immediate basin. In addition to rapid development in the Tonle Sap basin, climate change may threaten natural flow patterns that sustain its diversity. The impacts of climate change on river flows in […]

In this study, we estimate monthly variations of surface-water storage (SWS) and subsurface water storage (SSWS, including groundwater and soil moisture) within the Lower Mekong Basin located in Vietnam and Cambodia during the 2003–2009 period. The approach is based on the combination of multisatellite observations using surface-water extent from MODIS atmospherically corrected land-surface imagery, and […]

The ASEAN Power Grid (APG) is the grand plan for an integrated regional power grid system in Southeast Asia designed to benefit its member countries by optimizing the use of energy resources. In this paper, we study how to fairly distribute the benefit of the APG to its member countries by focusing on the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which includes Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Using data from two different years, 2012 and 2020, we analyze 12 scenarios with different combinations of the generation and the transmission capacities together with the maximum percentage of power trade allowed. We propose to allocate the total cost saving of the GMS by using the Myerson (1977) value. We show that the resulting Myerson value allocation from the 2020 plan satisfies two stability properties: (1) core stability, which implies that it belongs to the core when the core is nonempty, so that no country has an incentive to leave the APG, and (2) pairwise stability, which implies that no country has an incentive to add a new transmission line or delete an existing transmission line.

This study examines whether policies to promote renewable electricity generation are likely to be effective by applying panel unit root and stationarity tests to time series data on renewable electricity generation for 115 countries over the period 1980-2008. We find that for the panel as a whole, and almost three quarters of the individual countries, renewable electricity generation is characterized by a unit root. This result implies that policies to promote renewable electricity generation, such as renewable portfolio standards, which result in annual increases in renewable energy and, as such, which represent permanent positive shocks to the long-run growth path of renewable electricity generation, will be more effective in increasing renewable electricity generation than policies with a pre-specified time horizon.