EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities

The Research Facility on Inequalities, a partnership between the European Commission (DevCo) and AFD, has launched its series of weekly webinars. After three years of research aiming to understand and address inequalities in developing and emerging countries, it is now time to share some of the results.

Join us for the seventh session of the EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities’ webinars to be held on Monday, July 6^th at 11.00 am CEST, dedicated to the project Inequalities and environmental changes in the lower Mekong river basin.

Huynh Thi Phuong Linh, researcher at French Institute of Research for Development (IRD) in Ha Noi, will present the paper “Inequalities and Environmental changes in the Mekong region: a scoping review”, co-written with Stéphane Lagrée, Etienne Espagne and Alexis Drogoul.

WEBINAR 7 │ Monday, July 6^th 2020 11:00 CET

“Inequalities and Environmental changes in the Mekong region: a scoping review”

Huynh Thi Phuong Linh⁽¹⁾, Stéphane Lagrée⁽²⁾, Etienne Espagne⁽³⁾, Alexis Drogoul⁽⁴⁾

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Rising inequalities and accelerating environmental changes are two of the most significant and intertwined challenges of the twenty-first century. The Mekong River basin is both a crucial ecological constituent of the South-East Asian Region and a driving force of its economic dynamics. Numerous studies have tackled one specific aspects of the relation between environmental changes and inequalities in the region, but no holistic assessment has been conducted so far.

It is thus essential to conduct scoping and systematic reviews on the topic to help sort out the consolidated results which is useful for policy makers; then to identify from the topics where more research would be needed. The environmental aspects investigated include (but are not limited to) dam construction, pollution, resources over-extraction, land degradation and climate change impacts; their impacts vary from one group of population to another and are strongly informed by social inequalities.

This presentation covers the result of scoping review in which scientific, institutional and gray documents are scoped and filtered according to criteria of inclusion and exclusion. 14.407 studies from five countries including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam are investigated. The results will produce a systematic map of the different manifestations of environmental changes and inequalities relation studied and their distribution across countries and knowledge realms, identify gap of knowledge, and provide foundation for systematic review.

Keywords: Inequalities, Environmental changes, Mekong countries, Scoping review, Systematic mapping.

¹ French Institute of Research for Development (IRD). Contact: huynhtplinh@gmail.com, linh.huynhthiphuong@ird.fr
² Nantes University – ERASMUS+ WANASEA project
³ French Development Agency (AFD)
⁴ French Institute of Research for Development (IRD)