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As non-state actors, environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) are able to influence the governance process in many cases. Although the ENGOs role in climate change governance has been extensively studied over the last two decades, there is a dearth of research relating to Malaysian ENGOs. Accordingly, this study was conducted to compensate for this gap in the literature, and it employs a qualitative approach via analysis of relevant documents and in-depth interviews with eleven ENGO informants operating in Malaysia at national, sub-national and local levels. The informants were selected through purposive sampling, and the interview data were analysed using thematic analysis. The informants described the ENGO roles in climate change governance at national, sub-national, and local levels, and their roles were described in the context of the following six key themes: political, informational, educational, complementary, observational, and innovational. Similar to earlier perspectives, the results of the present study revealed that the government generally accepts the ENGOs’ role to facilitate climate change governance. This article provides insight into the ENGO’s role in assisting the government in governing climate change in Malaysia.

Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) are considered key players for engendering good climate change governance to address both climate change and sustainable development. The participation of ENGOs in climate change governance occurs in a four-phase policy cycle. They include (1) identification of policy options, (2) policy formulation, (3) policy implementation, and (4) policy monitoring and evaluation. The ENGOs, however, have been criticized for their lack of effectiveness, and their roles in tackling climate change remain unclear. To date, the study on the roles and activities of Southeast Asian ENGOs in climate change governance has been under-researched. This study, therefore, applies a systematic literature review of 19 published articles from Scopus and Web of Science-indexed journal to understand the current state of the Southeast Asian ENGOs participation in climate change governance based on the four-phase policy cycle. The findings show that the ENGOs in Southeast Asia are involved directly and indirectly in climate change governance. They are significant actors in the implementation of the climate change policy, but they play a minimal role in the formulation of said policy. It implies that they could also be a vital partner to the government in the climate change governance process as they can bring effective policy improvements. Lastly, this review will recommend future avenues of research for scholars.

Flood is becoming an intensive hydro-climatic issue at the Kelantan River basin in Malaysia. Univariate frequency analysis would be unreliable due to multidimensional behaviour of flood, which often demands multivariate flow exceedance probabilities. The joint distribution analysis of multiple interacting flood characteristics, i.e. flood peak, volume and duration, is very useful for understanding critical hydrologic behaviour at a river basin scale. In this paper, a copula-based methodology is incorporated for multivariate flood frequency analysis for the 50-year annual basis flood characteristics of Kelantan River basin at Guillemard bridge station in Malaysia. Investigation reveals that the Lognormal (2P), Johnson SB-4P and Gamma-3P are selected as marginal distributions for the flood peak flow, volume and duration series. Several bivariate families such as mono-parametric, bi-parametric (i.e. mixed version) and rotated version of Archimedean copulas and also the elliptical copula are introduced to cover a large dependence pattern of flood characteristics. The dependence parameter of bivariate copulas is estimated by the method of moments (MOM) based on the inversion of Kendall’s tau and maximum pseudo-likelihood estimator. To analytically validate and recognize most parsimonious copulas, GOF test and Cramer–von Mises distance statistics (Sn) with the parametric bootstrap method are employed. The Gaussian copula is identified as the most justifiable model for joint modelling of the flood peak–volume and peak–duration combination for MOM-based parameter estimation procedure. Similarly, the Frank copula is selected as the best-fitted structure for modelling peak–duration combination based on MPL estimators, but the MOM estimator recognized Gaussian copula as most suitable for peak–volume pair. Furthermore, the best-fitted copulas are used for obtaining the joint and conditional return periods of the flood characteristics.

Floods are becoming the most challenging hydrologic issue in the Kelantan River basin in Malaysia. All three flood characteristics, i.e. peak flow, flood volume and flood duration, are important when formulating actions and measures to manage flood risk. Therefore, estimating the multivariate designs and their associated return periods is an essential element of making informed risk-based decisions in this river basin. In this paper, the efficacy of a kernel density estimator is tested by assessing the adequacy of kernel functions for capturing flood marginal density of 50 years (from 1961 to 2016) of daily streamflow data collected at Gulliemard Bridge gauge station in the Kelantan River basin. Tests for stationarity or the existence of serial correlation within the flood series is often a pre-requisite before introducing the random samples into a univariate or a multivariate framework. It was found that homogeneity existed within the flood vector series. It was concluded therefore that time series of the flood vectors do not exhibit any significant trend. Based on analytically based fitness measures, it was concluded that it is likely that Triweight kernel function is the best-fitted distribution for defining the marginal distribution of peak flows, flood volumes and flood durations in the Kelantan River basin.

Mustafa, F.-B. and Bwadi, B.E., 2018. Determination of optimal freshwater prawn farming site locations using GIS and multicriteria evaluation. In: Ashraf, M.A. and Chowdhury, A.J.K. (eds.)...

To combat soil erosion in the northern part of Taraba State, Nigeria, farmers are of major importance. Their perceptions vitally influence the levels of support and investment associated with solving problems of soil erosion through adoption of practices that are alternative to those in current use, including approaches focused on soil conservation. The objective of this study was to evaluate how farmer perceptions of soil erosion influence their investments in soil conservation, particularly soil or stone bunds, their applications of organic amendments and inorganic fertilizers and other soil conservation practices. In the study area, we undertook a field plot experiment and carried out a survey, using open- and closed-ended questions. Water erosion and depletion of fertility were taken as the main indicators of soil erosion. The results of the experiment showed that farmers were aware of and perceived both indicators as having increased over the past decade. Farmer investments in water erosion control (3.7 US/ha) and the prevention of soil fertility depletion (37.8 US/ha) in the study area were found to be limited. The results also showed that awareness of water erosion was only marginally correlated with investment in water erosion control (χ2 = 4.906, P = 0.09) and not associated with investments in soil fertility control measures (χ2 = 0.175, P = 0.92). Those farmers who identified depletion of soil fertility as a problem, based on erosion, were not significantly more likely to make greater investments in soil conservation (χ2 = 0.947, P = 0.62) but did invest more in fertility measures (χ2 = 3.199, P = 0.20). Hence, further research is needed to determine other factors that may influence farmer investment in soil conservation, especially factors related to socio-economic characteristics of farm households, institutional and technological innovations and field characteristics that were not addressed in this study.

In this study we analyzed sequences of the COI gene to investigate the genetic structure and diversity in four populations of the Giant Malaysian Prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, and to test the effectiveness of cyclical mating as means of securing genetic diversity. Forty-three haplotypes were generated for the parental populations; most of these were unique, with moderate genetic and low nucleotide diversities. However Tajima's neutrality test indicated a significant (p < 0.05) departure of the Negeri Sembilan population from the mutation–drift equilibrium, suggesting that it may be losing genetic variability. To combat this problem we recommend a seasonal fishing ban. The AMOVA test results (5.45%, p < 0.00001), the networking of haplotypes and their phylogenetic tree all revealed clear population structuring between the populations. Genetic or haplotype diversity in the progeny groups had increased indicating that a cyclical mating system could be an effective means of maintaining it. The utilization of unique haplotypes in aquaculture, developing DNA barcodes for broods in genetic improvement programs as well as in evaluating restocking activities is recommended. For a better insight into the differences between and among the populations, further investigations using nuclear markers are required.