Southeast Asian lakes provide several ecosystem services and are an important natural resource for water supplies, industry, agriculture, shipping, fishing, and recreation. It is demonstrated that they are highly vulnerable to anthropogenic and climate threats. Scientific studies clearly demonstrated that climate change has already significantly affected the SEA region and that these impacts will continue and expand as the pace of climate change accelerates. However, a deep understanding of “if” and “how” climate change, as well as the intensification of land uses may exacerbate those impacts on such vulnerable ecosystems across the whole region is lacking.

CCRASEAL will try to detect possible linking between observed alterations to multiple-threats, to understand if, when and where threats overlap and will define and choose metrics that best quantify the effects of multiple threats and their changes under future scenarios of climate and land uses. CCRASEAL will thus design a regional-scale approach for filling existing knowledge gaps and will provide guidance for addressing the urgent management challenges posed by multiple threats in freshwater ecosystems.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the project has a strategic approach and transdisciplinary outlook to guarantee that the linkage between science and policy at the regional level will be strengthened by actively engaging academic and government partners from 5 different countries in the Indo-Burma region.