Whether embankments should be used to control floods is a question of great importance in the eastern Gangetic plain, where embankment breaches cause severe flood damage every year and huge damage due to major breaches every few years. Critics of the embankment policy have called for a strategy of living with floods by building dispersed infrastructure to cope with floods. However, no cost–benefit analysis of alternative strategies is available. This paper makes a first pass at evaluating embankments.

The global community has recognized the importance of forests for biodiversity, and has prioritized the preservation of forest biodiversity and ecosystem functions through multiple multilateral agreements and processes such as the Convention on Biodiversity’s Aichi Targets and the Millennium Development Goals. The Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) provides one mechanism for tracking progress toward such goals in three particular areas: primary forest area, protected forest areas, and areas designated for the conservation of biodiversity.

The Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Asia and the Pacific produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, status, and trends of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. The assessment analyses the direct and underlying causes for the observed changes in biodiversity and in nature’s contributions to people, and the impact that these changes have on the quality of life of people.

Despite the Solid Waste Management Rules (SWM), 2016 stating that waste generators should segregate their waste before it is collected; most households in Delhi continue to be non-compliant. We conduct a study in 15 localities of Delhi to understand whether information, norms and economic incentive would have an effect on households’ compliance to rules. The study uses field experiments to elicit the impact of the interventions.

This paper presents a systematic review of biodiversity/ecosystem services scenario exercises from the Asia–Pacific region. From the limited scholarly literature available, 61 scenario exercises were examined to explore their typology and multiple scenario attributes, including geographic distribution, consideration for influential drivers, choices of ecosystem services, number of alternative futures and temporal horizons for scenario deployment.

The climate sensitivity of electricity demand in India is likely to be highly sensitive to growth in income. Thus, both intensive and extensive adjustments in cooling and heating will play an important role in determining future climate change impacts on electricity demand.

Traditional discussions of the relationships between energy, CO2 emissions and human development capture between-country differences, but fail to expose within-country energy and CO2 emissions inequality. Household survey data offers researchers a window through which to better understand the unequal distribution of energy use and the Human Development Index (HDI) at a sub-national level.