Cartographie systématique de la région du Mékong pour mieux comprendre les liens entre inégalités et changements environnementaux

Abstract

How does accelerating environmental change affect inequality, and conversely, how does increasing inequality affect environmental dynamics? We present a systematic mapping that investigates the relationship between these two crucial aspects of sustainable development in five Mekong River Basin countries: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Inequalities are considered by examining the impact of environmental issues-such as land and water policies, economic interventions in hydropower, mining, or commercial plantations, climate disasters, pollution, and health problems – on various population groups – including ethnic minorities, precarious populations, smallholders, women, or migrants. 14570 scientific publications, books or reports in the "grey literature" were collected and screened by title, abstract and full text. 2355 articles are included in the systematic mapping over the period 1978-2020. In general, articles that directly address inequalities in relation to environmental change are rare and recent. Three themes appear particularly represented: access to resources and rights issues (967 articles); climate change and the impacts of natural disasters (533 articles); and the – growing – aspects related to pollution (299 articles). The systematic map sets the scene of research interests, their distribution geographically, and evolution over time, on how various groups of people being affected by environmental changes. A repository is built with an open access to all abstract-selected references to support further research and projects on sub-topics of the inequality-environmental change nexus, and support science-based policy decisions.

Keywords

• Mekong
• climate
• environmental inequalities
• rights
• systematic map
• pollution.