ASEAN environmental efforts

Regional Haze Action Plan and ADB Initiative

A major outcome of the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Haze held in Singapore in December 1997 was the adoption of the Regional Haze Action Plan (RHAP) which sets out concrete and cooperative programs to address the smoke haze problem arising from land and forest fire. The Action Plan calls for specific measures to :

-prevent land and forest fires through better management policies and enforcement, and intensified public education programmes;
-establish operational mechanisms to monitor land and forest fires, and ;
strengthen regional land and forest fire-fighting capability.

In this connection, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) approached the ASEAN Secretariat late last year to fund a Regional Technical Assistance (RETA) project, entitled Strengthening ASEAN's Capacity to Prevent and Mitigate Transboundary Atmospheric Pollution. The US$1 million grant proposal from ADB was subsequently endorsed by the Haze Technical Task Force and the ASEAN Environment Ministers and aims to strengthen the capacity of ASEAN to operationalize and monitor the RHAP in order to prevent and mitigate transboundary smoke and haze pollution. A project management unit, staffed with a team of experts, has been established at the ASEAN Secretariat to coordinate and implement the required tasks and activities of the RETA.

Since the commencement of the RETA in April 1998, the project has assisted ASEAN members countries in developing the Detailed Implementation Plans (DIPs) of their respective National Haze Action Plans as well as the DIPs for the two Sub-Regional Fire-fighting Arrangements (SRFAs) for Borneo and Sumatra which have been established. The RETA has also produced a DIP for the Regional Haze Action Plan and played an instrumental role in developing partnership with and mobilizing funding and technical assistance from several funding sources in support of the operationalization of the RHAP. In this regard, as of October 1998, the ADB, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Australian Government and the US Government have made financial contributions while several other organizations have indicated interest and are in the process of considering providing support to the RHAP

http://www.aseansec.org/2838.htm

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