The Fourteenth Session of the Intergovernmental Meeting (IG14) of the Malé Declaration on Control and Prevention of Air Pollution and its LikelyTransboundary Effects for South Asia (Malé Declaration) was held in Bangkok, Thailand on 25 November 2015. The event was attended by the representatives of the eight participating countries, namely, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Experts from international organisations, such as the Asian Institute of Technology, the South Asia Cooperative Environment Programme (SACEP), the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the United Nations Environment Program, Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (UNEP ROAP), and the Secretariat, …

The Fourteenth Session of the Intergovernmental Meeting (IG14) of the Malé Declaration on Control and Prevention of Air Pollution and its LikelyTransboundary Effects for South Asia (Malé Declaration) was held in Bangkok, Thailand on 25 November 2015.

The ‘Malé Declaration on Control and Prevention of Air Pollution and its likely Transboundary Effects for South Asia’ is an intergovernmental network involving Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, the Republic of Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Since its inception in 1998 the Malé Declaration National Focal Points (NFPs) and National Implementing Agencies (NIAs) have worked on a comprehensive set of activities, funded by the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (Sida), to build capacity in South Asia for the assessment of air pollution impacts and prevention and control options. The programme was very ambitious from the outset and considerable progress has …

To make it easy for the National Implementing Agency (NIA) personnel to perform their tasks proficiently, it was also decided to develop a Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) manual. Accordingly, this manual has been written by Asian technical advisor on monitoring to the Malé Declaration, checked and reviewed by the MoC.

Atmospheric brown cloud (ABC), a frequently occurring phenomenon in many regions of the world, is a regional scale plume of air pollution that consists of a mixture of anthropogenic sulfate, nitrate, organics, black carbon, dust and fly ash particles and natural aerosols, such as sea salt and mineral dust. Greater awareness of the ABC problem was generated by the 1999 Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) initiative over the North Indian Ocean region. Global concern came about following the first preliminary report on ABC, which was based on INDOEX. The global implications of ABCs were highlighted by the United Nations Environment Programme …