The Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) has been funding for several years a wide variety of important research projects in Southeast Asia focused on land use and land cover change. The program has dovetailed with existing global change programs of the IGBP and IHDP, including the START program, and has supplemented these programs and their projects with new sources of support, which enhance the linkages between science and decision-making and policy. Much progress has been made in the region supporting both fundamental research on important global change questions related to understanding drivers of land use change, the impact of land use change on the global carbon cycle, effects of land use and land cover change on biodiversity and ecological structure and function, forest management, sustainable development, monitoring and information systems, and spatial decision support systems.

This support has also focused on developing human resource capacity and building active networks of collaborating scientists and institutions. Considerable gains have been made using small amounts of funds in the right places to support long term collaborations, many of which bring considerable matching funds and local institutional partnering. This twinning of support for research and capacity building has been fundamental in developing a kind of training-by-doing approach to capacity building, which provides foundations for long-term research, even to the point of supporting groups that eventually have become self-sufficient and self-supporting within the region.

Funding from APN has also made it possible to bring Asian scientists into the larger international community of active global change scientists, and at the same time made Asia a respected and desired place for international participation and cooperation. This opening up of the region has been important for creating opportunities for Asian scientists in the international programs and for creating long standing bi-lateral and multi-lateral programs between Asian institutions and scientists and those in Europe, North America and elsewhere in the world. The groundwork for significant cross-region comparative work has been laid. The importance of the region in the global agenda has been established.

In 2002, the APN convened its funded investigators in a workshop to assess and synthesize recent results and progress in LUCC related research in SE Asia. The APN Land Use and Cover Change initial synthesis report will shortly be available on the APN website.