Mun river basin in Northeast Thailand is a prime example of the area impacted by hydro-meteorological hazards. Its specific vulnerability lies in the fact that its upstream parts are more prone to droughts, whereby the downstream part of the basin is a flood risk zone. About 80 to 90% of rice cultivation area in the Mun river basin is rain-fed. Rainfall in the study area is highly erratic both in space and time even though the annual average amount is near to the norm of Thailand. This unevenness has serious effects on rice production, living conditions and income of farmers who are the main population in the region. ENRICH will bring together expertise and experience from UK and Thailand in the areas of climate variability and climate change, floods and drought modelling and water resources management. The ultimate aim of this project is to establish a strong collaboration and exchange of knowledge between the University of Exeter and AIT, to develop innovative integrated solutions to address the pressing problem of hydro-meteorological extremes and adaptation strategies and measures in the Mun river basin. The proposed project will address the following research questions: - What are the main environmental drivers affecting the meteorological and climate variability and change in Northeast of Thailand? - What are possible hydro-meteorological scenarios and extremes in future in the study area? What is the level of confidence that the projected changes can be attributed to environmental and climate changes? - What are the expected changes in hydro-meteorological hazards and risks due to future climatic extremes? - What are the possible and plausible adaptation strategies and measures to improve climate resilience in the study basin? In line with the recent policy and planning of the Royal Irrigation Department and Department of Water Resources of Thailand, this study will investigate drought hazard due to future climate change, and its impacts on vulnerability and risk in the study area. Furthermore, analysis on current adaptive measures and recommendation for further improvement to cope with future climate change will be produced. The proposed two and a half year research programme will be realized through four integrated Work Packages (WPs): WP1 Land use changes WP2 Climate variability and climate change WP3 Hydrometeorological extremes WP4 Adaptation strategies based on the synthesis of results The ENRICH team will work closely with the Thai Department of Water Resources and the Royal Irrigation Department, from the project inception workshop, through data acquisition and analysis and finally during the dissemination phase, so that the outputs can be taken up. Two public participation meetings will be organised in the study area with local stakeholders - farmers, industries, local line agencies at provincial/district levels etc. - to understand the hydro-meteorological hazards related issues (at the start of the project), and discuss adaptation measures (towards the end of the project while developing the adaptation strategies and measures) with them. Whilst ENRICH is a stand-alone initiative that can be completed independently, from an early stage it will seek cooperation with other projects funded within this programme to identify the potential for synergies through sharing data and expertise.

In recent years, there has been increasing recognition at many levels that finding and implementing solutions to complex global problems requires deeply integrated activity from many disciplines, often called a transdisciplinary approach, and a workforce with the capabilities to implement such an approach. Traditionally higher education (HE) has been organised in discipline siloes with organisational, language and world view barriers to mutual understanding, let alone the sort of transdisciplinary action necessary to address complex global problems. This project will develop and implement within Thailand, a transdisciplinary postgraduate programme focused around the issue of climate change and specifically the call to action encompassed in Green Deal agendas. The courses will be implemented in the first instance by a Faculty of Agriculture (Kasetsart University), a Faculty of Public Health (Thammasat University) and a School of Environment, Resources and Development (Asian Institute of Technology) supported by Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Heidelberg University (Germany). Together the partners will develop and deliver nine transdisciplinary courses focused on Green Deal approaches, which will be combined at the end of the project to form a new degree of Master of Science in Transdisciplinary Practice.Partnerships with key government, private and civil society organisations are considered to be critical to ensuring the relevance and impact of the courses; so, these agencies will be involved from the beginning in planning the overall programme, developing and delivering curricula for each course. In addition, opportunities will be provided for personnel from these agencies to participate in courses for training.Through the Hub for Innovation in HE, the project seeks to engage other HEIs and relevant agencies to foster transdisciplinary education and practice, disseminate information and lessons learnt and sustain capacity building initiatives.

Industry 4.0 has grasped attentions of industry, academic and research institutes as well as governments all over the world, including in EU countries and Thailand. In line with European 2020, the Thailand government has foreseen also the need for change from production-based economy (Thailand 3.0) to value-based economy (Thailand 4.0) in order for Thai industries to be competitive. There will be a need for human resource development for a new type of qualified MSc graduates to support Thailand 4.0 as well as Industry 4.0. Therefore, this capacity building project is proposed to enhance the capacity and ability of universities in Thailand for the delivery of a high quality competence-based curriculum for Master’s degree in industrial engineering that supports sustainable smart industry (Industry 4.0), conforms to European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and is applicable to EU partner universities. The project will be specifically focused on • Modernization of a curriculum for Master’s degree in industrial engineering that also meet the EU quality standard requirements,• Development and implement of modern ICT teaching tools and methods for effective student-centered learning of the curriculum,By achieving the objectives, this project will deliver a modernized MSIE curriculum containing 15 new courses that will be equipped with teaching and learning materials. The course will also be prepared for Online learning. 9 courses will be pilot tested. Laboratory with remote access will be built to support student learning. More importantly, teaching and technical staffs will be trained by experts in the areas from EU partners. It is expected that the curriculum will be able to address the needs of the industry as well as the nation in term of capacity building for Thailand 4.0. Although the curriculum will be developed to support Thai industries, it, meeting EU standards, can potentially be disseminated to other universities in the region.

Seven workshops, organized alternately in Europe and Asia, enabled skills building between the environmental and information science teams. The cross-skills thus established have enabled the majority of the members of the TORUS program to progress from a multidisciplinarity towards an operational transdisciplinarity - where the disciplines interpenetrate with a common language and knowledge bases. Details of the presentations and courses given during the workshops are available online on the program's website (http://www.cloud-torus.com):1.the meeting between two worlds, geosciences and cloud computing.2.computer architecture and application in environmental sciences.3.cloud computing for air pollution research.4.cloud computing for prospective studies of land use change.5.cloud computing for Remote Sensing.6.HUPI platform and sensitivity analysis.7.TORUS cookbook.In addition to the documents produced for the workshops, three books are published from TORUS productions. Books to be published in 2020 by ISTE editions. The first volume poses the problem of large data in geosciences before presenting the main methods of analysis and IT solutions mobilized to respond to them. The second volume presents remote sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial data infrastructures (SDI) which are central to all disciplines dealing with geographic space. The third volume is a collection of thematic application cases representative of the specificities of the teams involved in TORUS and which motivated their needs in terms of cloud computing.TORUS also enabled the installation of the two computer servers initially planned and dedicated to cloud computing, one installed at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, the other at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi in Vietnam. Because to be powerful, the dynamic sharing of IT resources available at the base of coud computing at a cost, having your own equipment allows you to no longer be constrained and limited. Each server is equipped with more than 200 CPUs and powerful processing and storage memories (details on the website), it is possible to use them directly at the infrastructure level (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) but the most users develop services at platform level (PaaS - Platform as a Service) in this case HUPI (http://hupi.fr).Finally, TORUS has multiplied communication and promotion actions in order to open the program to other environmental themes and to promote scientific research related to the program (two theses were funded).We had bet with TORUS to bring environmental sciences to information sciences to offer the former the skills to understand the current paradigm of big data and cloud computing while opening up to the latter the environmental thematic dimension taken at very broad sense of the term. There was and there is still an urgent need to bring these universes together so that they work together for the sustainable development of our planet, which needs environmental conditions monitoring and prospective modeling to provide knowledge bases for decision-makers.

"The number of satellite programs dedicated to Earth observation has increased significantly over the last decades and will further increase in the future. Remote Sensing (RS) data offer the potential for more and more detailed and accurate mapping of land and contributing to the decision making. There is a large gap between the data collection and application. The application oriented education can contribute to increase the fields of applications. RS can be an essential tool in decision making, as it provides up to date information for decision makers on several aspects of Earth sciences, including hydrology, ecology, oceanography, glaciology, geology. Furthermore it has military, intelligence, commercial, economic, planning, and humanitarian applications. The EU space strategy in the document “2016 Communication on a Space Strategy for Europe” fosters the uptake of space techniques applications. ""The Commission’s aim is to optimize the benefits that space brings to society and the wider EU economy. Achieving this means boosting demand among public and private users, facilitating access to and use of space data, and stimulating the development and use of innovative downstream applications."" The demand is in line with the practice observed in the field of RS, which has wide range of potential applications unused.Beyond the international demand on broaden the range of RS applications both for public and private users and deepen the knowledge on the RS applications, also a demand on national level (Thailand, China) has been feedbacked. Universities can contribute to these demands by preparing widely accessible educational materials and supporting tools. The Learning Management System (LMS) developed within the frame of the IRSEL project may strengthen research, results in an uptake for the knowledge society, promoting the professional development of staff of related interdisciplinary fields. The LMS contains 20 modules in the field of Remote Sensing applications. The developed modules are available on the Moodle platform of the partner universities, and can be accessed by their students and academic staff. In line with the EC policy initiative on open access, the consortium partners are committed to developing project materials for mutual benefit. Accordingly, the core content of the LMS can be accessed by the professional society at large, as a „reduced feature” of the modules (degrading the content to pdfs) is provide openly for anyone, accessible at the link ttps://lms.irsel.eu/ . After a simple registration procedure one can get access to these pdfs, note however, that the though the content is similar to the „full feature”, that is the more attractive, interactive.The project has aimed to support the e-Learning education with high quality software, hardware, and a reasonable research facility for delivering the necessary tools for data acquisition and data processing. The equipments are integrated into the Knowledge Centre with the aim to serve the Remote Sensing application related education and research activity beyond the project timeframe. Knowledge Centres at each partner universities have been installed. The software and equipment park has been planned and validated by considering the available resources of each partner universities.Beyond the students at partner universities, the users of the LMS shall include students, managers, practitioners, and policy makers who may or may not be having background knowledge in RS. The program aims to deliver an understanding of environmental issues in the context of sustainable development from both, a theoretical and practical perspective as well as essential knowledge, instruments, and techniques for sustainable management of challenging environmental development issues."