Regional — Activities and Events — Center for Social Development Studies

On 25 January 2019, Center for Social Development Studies together with Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V. and Chatham House co-organized a Research Forum on “Powering up Sustainable Development for Asia: The Future of Global and Regional Investment in Asia’s Energy Sector”, which was held in Chulalongkorn University. For more information about this forum, please visit the link here.

You can read the report from the event here.

To read more about the findings from the event, please read the excerpt and visit the link below for an article by one of our co-organizers, Sam Geall from Chatham House.

Asia’s cryosphere, the vast stores of frozen water in the high mountains that feed the rivers on which some 1.3 billion people depend, is warming far faster than average, an expert assessment warned recently, adding that two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers could disappear by the end of the century.
This and other warning signs make clear the need for a sustainable energy transition in Asia, not only given the urgency of mitigating climate change, but also because renewable energy technologies can help to provide cheap and reliable energy to areas where grid-based provision is unreliable or otherwise prohibited by geography or high costs.
A green transformation, if done right, can address poverty reduction goals and improve health and environmental quality. But achieving this requires rethinking many assumptions about the current system that generates and distributes electricity, and its interconnections with a genuinely sustainable society.