This is the presentation made by Shobhakar Dhakal, Executive Director, Global Carbon Project in an event "Challenge 25 beyond borders?:promoting a low carbon society" on 23 January 2010 at Kobe, Japan, organised by: Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), Hyogo Prefectural Government.

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) releases the state of the global carbon cycle annually, including global and national emission estimates, trends of major drivers, and the carbon source-sink dynamics globally and regionally. The latest
release for the year 2008 by GCP in November 2009 brought additional important insights of carbon and societal relationships including, impact of trade, impact of financial crises, and the effect of slowing deforestation rate in
Amazonia. Asia is of paramount importance in this global carbon budget. The present talk provides quantitative details of why Asia is important in global carbon management and discusses the key drivers to be addressed (such as urbanisation, deforestation, growth and others) in order to promote low carbon societies in Asia.