Southeast Asia

U of T researchers help vulnerable populations in Southeast Asia tackle climate change

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 20:24:56 +0000

U of T researchers help vulnerable populations in Southeast Asia tackle climate change

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 09/23/2022 - 16:24

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A resident wades through a flooded alley as water overflows from the Chao Phraya river in Pathum Thani province, Thailand in 2021 (photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Ty Burke

Topic

Our Community

Climate Change

Global

Southeast Asia

Sustainability

U of T Mississauga

More than one billion people live in informal settlements in urban areas in the Global South – and they are among those who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

“These are what people often call slums. They are vast areas of cities, which are usually self-built and self-managed, and where people have no formal right to live,” says Amrita Daniere, a professor of geography, geomatics and the environment at the ��Ƶ Mississauga.

Amrita Daniere

“People who live in these settlements have little access to services like sanitation, water and transportation. They are often considered illegal and residents are subject to eviction or having their homes destroyed. Their lives are precarious and this makes people especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”

Nature-based infrastructure solutions could help make these areas less vulnerable to extreme heat and unpredictable flooding – but only if they are adopted. The Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia project (UCRSEA) examined what needs to occur for these approaches to be implemented. The five-year, multi-disciplinary international research collaboration, funded by both the International Development Research Centre and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, brought together scholars from U of T’s Asian Institute, the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Thailand Environmental Institute.

“Green infrastructure solutions emphasize using nature, so we don’t have to rely on conventional technologies like concrete, dikes and dams to do the work of holding back flood waters or mitigating against extensive heat,” says Daniere.

There are many actions cities can take to mitigate and adapt to climate change, even in slums, but, according to Daniere, researchers found that people aren’t always aware of what can be done.

“There is not a lot of connection between the people who understand these issues and those who make decisions. That isn't an enormous insight, but our project was the first time that some scholars engaged directly with politicians and decision-makers.”

The climate resilience project looked at medium-sized cities across Southeast Asia. These cities typically receive direction from central governments, which are based in larger centres like Bangkok, Thailand and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

“They get ideas and funding from the national government, and most of them are pretty conventional,” says Daniere. “You build a dam and have flood pumping equipment. They don't necessarily explore building green roofs or roads with porous pavement that are lined with trees and bushes. Up until this point, development in Southeast Asia has been quite Western-oriented in terms of what a modern city should look like.”

Santichon Songkroh, a small community along Bangkok Noi Canal in Thailand, faced daily flooding caused by leaking water barricades and heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Kompasu (photo by Phobthum Yingpaiboonsuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

One of the project’s main goals was to help create knowledge and provide vulnerable people with the space to learn about and share in decisions that could protect them from the economic, social and physical impacts of climate change. To make these voices heard, researchers used Theory of Change, which asks how and why change can be achieved in a given context.

“We wanted to convince policy-makers to consult with local communities and work together to design adaptation projects that prioritize their needs, rather than making top-down decisions. But for this to happen, we need to know who to reach and with what kinds of information,” says Daniere.

"First, we need to learn who makes a decision and who they listen to. Where do they get information? And if we need to change their mind, then how do we get them the information they need to change? And once we’d done that, we came up with opportunities to invite decision-makers to interact with scholars conducting research with the communities – to put them together, so they can talk and learn and hear each other’s perspectives.”

Large annual workshops and smaller individual meetings were held throughout the project and, at its conclusion, decision-makers from across Southeast Asia gathered in Bangkok for an event where they discussed results and tried to produce straightforward communications products about the project’s findings. This was fundamental to getting people to participate authentically.

“Policy-makers made it clear to us that they weren’t interested in journal articles and research reports. They really need to have information that can be easily communicated,” says Daniere.

“Researchers need to understand how research is received. I always knew this was important – and there can be a sense that ideas are not implemented, even if they are really great. A lot of my own attention has been focused on being a conscientious scholar, working with communities and trying to prioritize their vision, voice and needs. This was the first time I realized that I don’t need to publish more papers.

“We focused on how to convince people to change and admitted to ourselves that if nobody pays attention to the research, then climate change is going to kill many people in these countries. I don't say that lightly, but it's true.”

Skip the history mid-term: U of T students spend four days munching on 200-year-old diets from Southeast Asia

ullahnor — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:38:52 +0000

Skip the history mid-term: U of T students spend four days munching on 200-year-old diets from Southeast Asia

ullahnor Tue, 11/29/2016 - 11:38

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Some students ate a rice-laden diet for four days as part of the experiential learning project (photo by Ruocaled via Flickr)

Peter Boisseau

Author legacy

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Undergraduate Education

For four days, fast food, sugary snacks and caffeine gave way to rice, sweet potatoes and soggy fish as U of T history students took on the alter egos of 17th- to 19th-century Southeast Asians.

The experiential learning project was part of a course called “Rice, Sugar and Spice in Southeast Asia: A Regional Food History” taught by Nhung Tuyet Tran, an associate professor of history at the Faculty of Arts & Science. Tran holds a Canada Research Chair in Southeast Asian History and is also affiliated with U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs.

In lieu of a mid-term, the students were asked to choose people living in the region between the 17th and 19th centuries and construct a diet based on factors such as the person’s socio-economic position. Students chose roles ranging from servants working on a plantation to Chinese mestizos in the Philippines and Javanese Muslims.

Amal Ismail-Ladak took on the persona of a 19th-century South Asian woman who was an indentured servant on a rubber plantation in colonial Malaya.

“You don’t realize until you experience it how much your life changes just by taking on another person’s diet for four days,” said Ismail-Ladak, a second-year undergrad studying international relations, health studies and history.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this. It generated so much intellectual curiosity.”

Some students were even able to pass the lessons on to their own families.

Eda Martinovic adopted the role of a mixed-race Chinese woman in 17th-century Spanish Philippines. Her husband and two young daughters joined in the rice-laden diet.

“I’m lucky to have done this with my family because I got to see their perspective,” Martinovic said. “Actually living it makes you think much more deeply about not only the lives of the mestizos, but your own position in life today.”

Caffeine jitters and sugar cravings sometimes got the best of the students, but the exercise allowed them to confess their dietary transgressions in a journal entry and to explain what they learned.

Fourth-year political science student Ben Murchison absent-mindedly gobbled down a candy bar during Halloween, then cursed himself for forgetting what life was like for the 19th-century Javanese sugar factory worker he was impersonating.

“My character was a person who woke up early every morning to a basic meal of rice and fish and then worked for 13 hours,” said Murchison. “It’s one thing to hear about that from a professor, and another to feel yourself hungry in the middle of the day.”

Like some of his other classmates, Bryan Goh chose to experience the diet of a Chinese mestizo in the Philippines, and soon was drawing parallels between today’s caviar and champagne-binging celebrities and his character, a relatively well-off person who was often forced to eat copious amounts of expensive white rice as a status symbol.

“Those celebrities today and the mestizos are both really boxed in by who they are and how they choose to portray themselves,” said Goh, a fourth-year human biology and history student. “It brought new meaning to food that I had never thought of before.”

The students said they came to realize that the project was not only about food, but also about identity – both aspirational and imposed – and they were profoundly affected by the experience.

Farhan Mahmood was able to reconnect with his heritage by adopting the character of a well-born Javanese Muslim in 19th-century Batavia (Jakarta) observing the fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Mahmood, a third-year physiology and human biology student, said he began to understand that the tradition of fasting from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan made everybody’s shared hunger a reminder they are all equal in God’s eyes.

On the third day of fasting, he saw the same homeless man in his neighbourhood he’d been walking past for four years. This time he stopped and offered to buy him something to eat.

“For me, it was a few dollars. For him, it probably gave him hope,” said Mahmood. “The feeling was so pure.”