| Abstract | Southeast Asia has been a focus for research by the global alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) program (http://www.asb.cgiar.org) since 1994. ASB has been recognized for ‘scaling up’ results of its research to the global level and its findings on tradeoffs between global environmental concerns and local and national development objectives, both of which have been useful in the global debate on sustainability (CGIAR, 2000). Tomich et al. introduce the collection by raising some guiding questions about three specific environmental problems at the meso-scale: smoke pollution, degradation
of biodiversity functions, and degradation of watershed functions—and making a preliminary assessment of where each of these problems lies in an environmental ‘issue cycle’. |
