This study explores the relationship between green space availability which is measured as both proportional land cover and per capita values, and socio-economic indicators across 129 regions in eight Southeast Asian countries. Using a cross-sectional and quantitative approach, the research assesses correlations between green space availability and key metrics such as the Human Development Index (HDI), GDP per capita, health index, and life expectancy. Data were sourced from Global Data Lab and mined from Google Earth Engine. Descriptive statistics, Spearman correlation, multiple linear regression, and cluster analyses were applied to identify patterns and relationships. The findings highlight considerable differences in the amount of green space available per person across regions, with more developed areas generally having less green space per capita due to population pressures. Results show significant negative correlations between green space per capita and HDI (rho = -0.6445, p < 0.05), GDP per capita (rho = -5,492, p < 0.05), and health index (rho = -0.6794, p < 0.05). Green space proportion also negatively correlated with HDI (rho = -0.1345, p < 0.05). These results suggest that the observed negative relationships between green space and development are not necessarily indicative of a direct trade-off, highlighting the need to reinterpret green space indicators within rapidly urbanising Southeast Asian contexts. When population density is introduced as a control variable, these associations remain consistent, suggesting that density-related spatial pressures, rather than the absence of green space itself, largely drive these patterns.
Amid an "environmental necropolitics" and a neoliberal paradigm of economic development that views rivers, lakes, and seas as resources to be exploited, sites to be displaced, or land to be "reclaimed", environmental debates in the Philippines have sedimented around the vital status of the bodies of water in question. In some instances, government agencies and private corporations stake the legitimacy of their infrastructure projects with the claim that the affected body of water is "dead", while environmental advocates contest the "death" of bodies of water to argue for their continuous protection. In other cases, governments hold up the status of being "alive" of a body of water as evidence of their sound management, while environmental advocates contest such claims, invoking the "dying" state of those bodies to the urgency of their conservationist demands. Drawing on an analysis of public discourse grounded in a broader ethnography and inspired by anthropology, STS, and multispecies perspectives on life and death, this article looks at three bodies of water in the Philippines - Manila Bay, Pasig River, and Laguna de Bay - to explore these "vital debates", including how various genres of expertise figure in them. What is at stake in these debates, we argue, are scientific and cultural assumptions about what it means for a body of water to be dead - and the political and economic implications of recognising it as alive.
This study argues that in low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, climate adaptation constitutes an ontological praxis of heritage. Through an ethnographic lens centred on Tuvalu's Atua-centric cosmology and Kiribati's Mauri philosophy, it contrasts community-driven relational adaptation with UNESCO's heritage-focused preservationist model. The research shows how islanders actively renegotiate connections between humans, ancestors, and more-than-human worlds through ritual innovation, knowledge transmission, and ecological dialogue - a process termed adaptive relational reontologization. Consequently, Indigenous survival ethics are recast as radical heritage practice, centred on sustaining obligations across generations and species. The study concludes that global heritage governance must move beyond material conservation to centre Indigenous relational ontologies, thereby reframing climate adaptation as an ongoing, living practice of heritage-making.
