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Sufficiency economy philosophy for sustainable future: Lessons of Thailand for other developing countries

This article has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text article. 2009 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 6 262016 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1755-1315/6/26/262016) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more

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Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 6 (2009) 262016

IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/6/262016

P26.07 Sufficiency economy philosophy for sustainable future: lessons of Thailand for other developing countries Angkarn Wongdeethai National Science and Technology Development Agency, Bangkok, Thailand The Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy, bestowed by His Majesty the King Bhumibol Adulyadej, to the people of Thailand in 1974 was reiterated again after the economic crisis in 1997, emphasized more balanced, holistic and sustainable development approach which has been widely adopted by individual, community, business, household and government levels. This promotes a low carbon consumption of individuals and societies, thus reduces the emission of greenhouse gases. The philosophy has been further adopted and translated into policy-oriented agriculture such as strengthening the competitiveness of agriculture sector, reduces heavily dependent on imported oil by encouraging renewable energy production. Thailand is one of the first countries in Asia to have policy to promote biofuel, cogeneration, distributed generation, and the generation of power from renewable energy. Although, recently, the US financial crisis has devastating the world economic and slow down the global consumptions, eventually, in the future, the shortage of food and energy problems will be resumed, and reemerged due to the increasing number of the world population and the depleting fossil fuel reserves rising. Only a nation with self-reliance can become a great nation. The Thai Government continues to improve her agriculture system, particularly strengthen local people knowledge, by technology transferred to secure food and energy production. The study examines the progress of several Royal development projects and lessons learned from numbers of healthy communities. Most people who, appropriately, change their course of development toward the philosophy will substantially achieve sustainable growth. Applications of the philosophy range from small-scale agriculture, suitable farming technologies, self-supporting, renewable energy production, strengthening the community, conservation of natural resource and environment, sustainable use of water resources, flood and drought mitigation, community forest preservation, improving health care and education, immunity to changes and globalization, and beyond.

c 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd