Community engagement in climate change, environment & community development at Chiang Mai University

Abstract

Energy Research and Development Institute-Nakornping (ERDI), Chiang Mai University (CMU) has focused our activities on renewable energy and efficiency improvement researches and related implementations especially to the communities and industries since 1995. Our researchers are focusing the work on innovations in responding to climate changes; both technology-wise and strategic-wise. Examples of our community engagement will be presented which include the programmatic CDM initiative; or so called "Thailand Small Scale Livestock Waste Management Program". CMU by ERDI, in corporate with The World Bank, is the first organization to implement a programmatic CDM to help livestock farms in Thailand to be able to produce Certified Emission Reductions (CER's); regulary known as 'carbon credit' and earn income from CER's trading. CMU works as a managing entity responsible for documentations and monitoring schemes to ensure CER's registration validity and accountability. The goal is to capture approximately 24,000 CER's per year into available carbon market (24,000 tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas emission reduction). ERDI have been working closely with Thailand Ministry of Energy and received series of grant from the Thailand Energy Conservation Fund to support biogas as renewable energy activities in Thailand. More than 600 biogas plants are employed using CMU biogas engineering technology as their geographic locations. As the results, approximate greenhouse gas emission reduction by methane capturing activities from the projects is expected in an order of 2 million tons of CO2 equivalent per annual. The CDM initiatives will certainly pave the way for ERDI to engage more with communities as CMU always values our role in community service.