The Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere (Regional-CES), which was first proposed in the Fifth Basic Environmental Plan of the Government of Japan in 2018 as a guiding concept for environmental policies, is a concept to promote sustainable development through applying circularity principle at the local and regional levels with close collaboration between rural and urban areas for maximum utilisation of local strengths and resources. The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) has promoted this Regional-CES concept to Asia working together with its partners including the local governments, private sector, and civil society organizations in Japan, Southeast and South Asia. As a part of such efforts, the Kansai Research Centre (KRC) of IGES conducted a joint scoping project with the Asia Pacific Network (APN) for Global Change Research with the objectives are to promote the Regional-CES concept in Southeast Asian countries.
To achieve the objective, IGES, in collaboration with APN, organised Regional-CES national workshops in three countries in Southeast Asia namely the Philippines in February 2022, Thailand in October 2022, and Indonesia in May 2023 inviting relevant stakeholders and introduced the concept of Regional-CES to see how their existing projects/areas can be interpreted in the concept and what is the entry point for the Regional-CES concept to integrate with the local contexts. The workshops also explored how the concept could bring benefits to those countries.