The Prospects of Controlling Open Burning of Crop Residues in Thailand: A Quantitative Assessment of Implementation Barriers and Costs

The open burning of agricultural crop residues poses a sizable threat to Southeast Asia’s near-term prosperity and long-term sustainability. Though Southeast Asia’s policymakers have adopted burning bans and other solutions to curb this threat, few studies have systematically assessed their implementation prospects. This study offers a novel data-driven assessment of those prospects in Thailand. More concretely, it estimates how much economic, technological, institutional, and social barriers could slow the implementation of burning restrictions featured in Thailand’s PM2.5 control plan. This study finds that institutional/social barriers delay implementation more than technical/economic barriers, resulting in about twice the level of PM2.5 emissions relative to an effectively implemented policy scenario over a 10- to 20-year period. This study also demonstrates that the costs of overcoming social/institutional barriers are approximately 14 million US dollars annually over a ten-year period. This figure is equivalent to about a 70% increase on the 21 million US dollars planned for controlling burning in 2026 in Thailand. The approach employed in this study—though not free of imperfections—can also be used for finer-grained comparison of the barriers/costs of managing different crop residues in Thailand and beyond.