Search

Political and economic transitions have had substantial impacts on forest conservation. Where transitions are underway or anticipated, historical precedent and methods for systematically assessing future trends should be used to anticipate likely threats to forest conservation and design appropriate and prescient policy measures to counteract them. Myanmar is transitioning from an authoritarian, centralized state with a highly regulated economy to a more decentralized and economically liberal democracy and is working to end a long-running civil war. With these transitions in mind, we used a horizon-scanning approach to assess the 40 emerging issues most affecting Myanmar's forests, including internal conflict, land-tenure insecurity, large-scale agricultural development, demise of state timber enterprises, shortfalls in government revenue and capacity, and opening of new deforestation frontiers with new roads, mines, and hydroelectric dams. Averting these threats will require, for example, overhauling governance models, building capacity, improving infrastructure- and energy-project planning, and reforming land-tenure and environmental-protection laws. Although challenges to conservation in Myanmar are daunting, the political transition offers an opportunity for conservationists and researchers to help shape a future that enhances Myanmar's social, economic, and environmental potential while learning and applying lessons from other countries. Our approach and results are relevant to other countries undergoing similar transitions.

This paper summarizes the urban water management framework that China's central government has adopted to manage the supply of water to the country's urban areas. These laws, policies and institutional arrangements cover water resources management, urban planning and environmental management issues. This paper considers the application of this framework in three urban areas: Beijing, Shanghai and Shaoxing Prefecture in Zhejiang Province. These case studies are used as the basis of a discussion on the ways that the framework could be enhanced, both structurally and in terms of its implementation.

This paper describes an approach to the integration of environmental flows recommendations into water resources planning, and demonstrates its application to a case study in the Jiaojiang Basin, Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, the People's Republic of China. In this approach, environmental flows recommendations were provided to the process as a preferred regime, and also as one or more sub-optimal regimes. A risk assessment approach was used to derive the sub-optimal regimes from the preferred regime. The environmental flows rules were then incorporated into a wider water resources model which allowed testing of any number of development scenarios. The model-predicted daily time series' of river flows were passed through a sophisticated form of spells analysis to evaluate the degree of compliance with a specified environmental flows regime. This degree of compliance was balanced against the predicted security of supply to water users. This integrated approach allowed for a greater appreciation of environmenta...