About

This coordinating action will focus on climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials issues and will aim to enhance collaboration between researchers in the EU and the ASEAN region. Addressing these issues in a coherent way is vital for sustainable development that leads to economic prosperity, social cohesion and environmental integrity. Both regions have developed innovative ideas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to adapt to climate change, improve resource efficiency and manage raw materials. SUSTAIN EU-ASEAN will draw primarily on EU funded projects focusing on these issues from various programmes, such as the FP7, SWITCH-Asia, Intelligent Energy Europe and others, but will also feed in experiences from the ASEAN region and bilateral projects into the mutual learning process.

The ASEAN region is very dynamic and has experienced remarkable rates of economic growth in the past few decades. This economic growth, however, has not been equally spread across society and region and has come at a substantial environmental cost. The ASEAN region can be considered a hotspot of climate and resource issues. It is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and has seen alarming growth rates in its greenhouse gas emissions, in particular in forestry and agriculture, energy and transport. With regard to natural resources, the ASEAN region is a source of a number of raw materials in high demand, such as various hydrocarbons and metals. Their exploitation creates substantial local environmental concerns and has still enormous potential for resource efficiency improvements.

The SUSTAIN EU-ASEAN project aims at establishing a more sustainable and integrated research and innovation cooperation between the EU and the ASEAN region in the areas of climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials. It will also improve the uptake and exploitation of respective research results by different user groups. The project’s approach is to achieve this through:

• Creating a knowledge base on the strategic environment for sustainable cooperation, uptake and implementation of results of joint EU-ASEAN environment research
• Developing and testing tools for increased synergies, uptake, exposure and visibility of joint EU-ASEAN research
• Developing a roadmap and concrete proposals for upgrading joint research and innovation, for more sustainable and strategic future cooperation
• Identifying and cluster EU funded and relevant bilateral projects in the area of climate action, raw materials and resource efficiency