Diane Archer

This report provides insights for food loss and waste (FLW) reduction across different food systems in Southeast Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Policymakers should consider socio-economic and sociopolitical dimensions that mediate air pollution impacts, such as gender and how it intersects with other factors.

The findings of this study can inform and enable policymakers in improving occupational air pollution, including addressing air pollution, pollution sources and other related issues in the garment manufacturing sector in Cambodia. Such interventions will help to uphold the health of workers as a human right, ensure safe workplaces, and also be beneficial for the country’s economic growth, as a healthy workforce is more productive. While the garment sector serves as Cambodia’s economic backbone and creates much-needed jobs, it is also a highly polluting industry, alongside being regularly implicated for not upholding labour rights. The sector emits pollutants to air from intensive energy use, solid and hazardous waste emissions, noise pollution and wastewater pollution discharge. Despite this, the sector’s environmental impacts in Cambodia, particularly in relation to air pollution, are not well known, and this gap was highlighted in the development of Cambodia’s 2021 Clean Air Plan. Aiming to fill this gap, in cooperation with SEI, the Air Quality and Noise Management Department of the General Directorate of Environmental Protection of Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment conducted a research project to improve understanding of air pollutant emissions from the textile industry and the health impacts on workers in Cambodia’s garment industry. The study drew on in-depth interviews with 323 garment factory workers across 16 factories, interviews with 16 factory owners, and quantitative data to better understand all interviewees’ experiences with occupational air pollution. While the research documented any symptoms related to air pollution, it did not employ medical research to assess the workers’ health status, nor did it attempt to investigate the cost or impact of air pollution on factory production. This policy briefing draws on a longer report prepared by the Ministry of Environment (Chandath, H., Chhay Por, I., Sokyimeng, S., Dana, S., Raksmey, Y. 2023. Understanding Air Pollution in the Garment Sector and Health Impacts on Workers: A Cambodian Case Study. Ministry of Environment, Cambodia. https://epa.moe.gov.kh/pages/categories/view/document-daqnm).

This study underscored the importance of waste as a resource that supports the livelihoods of many urban stakeholders in Bangkok. Examining drivers of household behaviour provides important insights into how to promote more sustainable behaviour. However, possibilities for individual behaviour change are constrained by factors including societal norms, lack of easy opportunities and lack of incentives. Policymakers have a leading role to play in piloting more efficient and circular waste structures, regulating industry and creating an enabling environment for sustainable behaviour, while ensuring that no one is left behind.

This scoping report synthesizes the authors’ initial work to understand the differentiated impacts of air pollution on workers in East and Southeast Asian countries and to identify evidence-based recommendations from regional case studies to help improve air quality and foster healthy employment in the context of just transitions towards a low-carbon economy.

This policy brief summarizes recent research on gender, age and other socioeconomic and cultural factors that lead to air pollution exposures in Viet Nam's workplaces. In addition to key findings, the authors make policy recommendations for local and national governments to address these issues at multiple scales.

Without the informal economy, there would be no waste recycling in most Asian cities. In many Asian countries, waste management systems are underdeveloped, with the informal economy dominating the processes of waste collection, sorting and recycling. In this short report, we present preliminary findings from our survey of 34 waste pickers in Bangkok. The report sheds light on their working conditions, health risks, gendered dimensions and the challenges they face in waste recycling.