The government of Indonesia has pledged to meet ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation goals in its Nationally Determined Contribution as well as reduce water pollution through its water management policies. A set of technologies could conceivably help achieving these goals simultaneously. However, the installation and widespread application of these technologies will require knowledge on how governance affects the implementation of existing policies as well as cooperation across sectors, administrative levels, and stakeholders. This paper integrates key governance variables--involving enforcement capacity, institutional coordination and multi-actor networks--into an analysis of the potential impacts on greenhouse gases and chemical oxygen demand in seven wastewater treatment scenarios for the fish processing industry in Indonesia. The analysis demonstrates that there is an increase of 24% in both CH₄ and CO₂ emissions between 2015 and 2030 in the business-as-usual scenario due to growth in production volumes. Interestingly, in scenarios focusing only on strengthening capacities to enforce national water policies, expected total greenhouse gas emissions are about five times higher than in the business-as-usual in 2030; this is due to growth in CH₄ emissions during the handling and landfilling of sludge, as well as in CO₂ generated from the electricity required for wastewater treatment. In the scenarios where there is significant cooperation across sectors, administrative levels, and stakeholders to integrate climate and water goals, both estimated chemical oxygen demand and CH₄ emissions are considerably lower than in the business-as-usual and the national water policy scenarios.

The open burning of agricultural crop residues poses a sizable threat to Southeast Asia’s near-term prosperity and long-term sustainability. Though Southeast Asia’s policymakers have adopted burning bans and other solutions to curb this threat, few studies have systematically assessed their implementation prospects. This study offers a novel data-driven assessment of those prospects in Thailand. More concretely, it estimates how much economic, technological, institutional, and social barriers could slow the implementation of burning restrictions featured in Thailand’s PM_2.5 control plan. This study finds that institutional/social barriers delay implementation more than technical/economic barriers, resulting in about twice the level of PM_2.5 emissions relative to an effectively implemented policy scenario over a 10- to 20-year period. This study also demonstrates that the costs of overcoming social/institutional barriers are approximately 14 million US dollars annually over a ten-year period. This figure is equivalent to about a 70% increase on the 21 million US dollars planned for controlling burning in 2026 in Thailand. The approach employed in this study—though not free of imperfections—can also be used for finer-grained comparison of the barriers/costs of managing different crop residues in Thailand and beyond.

Research has yielded increasingly robust estimates of the co-benefits from mitigating climate change while reducing air pollution, improving health, and meeting other development needs. Though quantifying these often hidden benefits could ease cost concerns and lower technological constraints for development-friendly climate solutions, achieving co-benefits frequently requires overcoming difficult-to-measure social and institutional barriers. This study extends insights from research focusing on quantitatively assessing the feasibility of a 1.5 °C future to build a multidimensional framework for measuring different barriers to achieving co-benefits. The framework offers a novel yet generalizable approach for bringing context-appropriate assessments of different dimensions of feasibility into the integrated assessment modelling that underpins work on co-benefits. It then outlines five steps for applying that framework to evaluate the size of different barriers for transport, agricultural and residential energy co-benefit solutions in Thailand. The results demonstrate that the sum of the delays from social/institutional barriers exceed economic/technological barriers for four out of six studied solutions. These delays also lead to increases of 24% to 31% in PM_2.5 emissions relative to a no-barriers effective implementation scenario between 2015 and 2030 and 2040. The feasibility framework can be integrated into not only national policy scenarios but also project assessments, following trends in carbon finance. An international barriers database as well as strengthening links to work on barriers and technological diffusion, transaction costs, and multi-level transitions can also help spread multi-dimensional feasibility assessments across countries and scales.

Interest in co-benefits—the multiple benefits from mitigating climate change while addressing other sustainability challenges—has grown as policymakers seek to lower the costs of decarbonization. Much of this interest stems from data-driven models that quantify how much improved air quality, better health, and other co-benefits can offset those costs. However, co-benefits research often features transport, residential energy, and other solutions that face greater social and institutional barriers than economic barriers to achieving estimated gains. Few studies have assessed the costs of overcoming these barriers. The main objective of this study was to develop and apply methods for estimating these costs. Toward that end, this study developed a mixed method approach that used original survey and budgetary data to estimate the costs of clearing social and institutional barriers to implementing transport and residential energy solutions in Thailand. The results revealed that the costs of overcoming key social and institutional barriers were approximately USD 170–270 million per year from 2022 to 2032 for the transport sector in Thailand. The costs of overcoming social and institutional barriers for residential energy solutions are approximately USD 0.07–0.1 million per year over a comparable period. The results suggested that the costs of overcoming barriers were likely lower than the benefits for all solutions and greater for transportation (driven by the implementation of inspection and maintenance programs) than residential energy in Thailand. More generally, the results underlined a need for greater integration between work on co-benefits and transaction costs to assist policymakers in understanding how much investing in institutional capacity building, coordination, awareness raising, and other enabling reforms can help align a healthier climate with other development priorities.