As the country observes World Environment Day Friday, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) urged Thursday individuals to take practical actions that can efficiently mitigate the effects of climate change.

ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) executive director Rodrigo Fuentes said that “if no action is done to combat climate change, the peoples of the ASEAN region stand to lose a great deal.”

This year’s theme is “Your Planet Needs You! Unite to Combat Climate Change.”

Fuentes said the topic is important and timely coming on the heels of a study released by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in April 2009, showing that Southeast Asia faces a bleak future if governments do not act quickly to address climate change.

Entitled “The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia: A Regional Review,” the study found that Southeast Asia will be hit hard by climate change, causing the region’s agriculture-dependent economies to contract by as much as 6.7 percent annually by the end of the century.

It also identified Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam as the most vulnerable countries.

“With 80 percent of the region’s over 560 million people living within 100 kilometers of the coastline, we do have cause for concern. As the ADB report highlighted, the sea level is rising one to three millimeters annually, and average temperature rose 0.1 to 0.3 degrees Celsius between 1951 and 2000,” Fuentes said.

He also pointed out that the loss of Southeast Asia’s natural treasures due to climate change will also have a significant impact on the entire global sustainability.

Meanwhile, Secretary Heherson T. Alvarez, presidential adviser on global warming and climate change, called on the public Thursday to contribute to the government’s efforts to address the problem of climate change.

Alvarez, who heads the Philippine delegation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference in Bonn, Germany from June 1 to 12, is one of the more than 4,000 delegates from 182 countries who are expected to discuss and negotiate an effective international climate change deal for the Copenhagen conference in December.

The former senator expressed alarm over the snowballing number of catastrophes that hit the country, which according to him, were brought about by climate change.

“The Earth is in peril. Unprecedented long droughts and escalating ferocious storms brought about by creeping climate change are affecting archipelagic low-lying communities such as the Philippines. We are calling on all citizens to join us in a carbon cutting coalition versus climate change because we are at war, fighting for the survival of the Earth,” he said.