Disasters and emergency response
Disasters
Ministry promotes more water efficient crops
Taking precautions against drought, the Ministry of Agriculture is encouraging farmers to stop growing summer paddy in areas where water is scarce, according to deputy minister U Tun Win. Though the previous government wanted farmers to prioritise growing paddy, with water reservoirs near empty in several ...
No authority to prevent new Mekong River projects: MRC
The Mekong River Commission does not have the authority to stop projects even if they have trans-boundary effects, delegates to the fourth Green Mekong Forum said on 13 June, while the Thai Irrigation Department presented a water diversion project to fight poverty. If the MRC member states – ...
Heavy downpours continue to batter Arakan State
Heavy rain and severe flooding continue to devastate parts of Arakan State, a spokesperson for the Arakan State Government, told The Irrawaddy on 13 June. Arakan State’s Ministry of Social Welfare and Ministry of Electric Power, Industry, and Roads and Communications reportedly intend to visit flood-affected ...
CARDI raises climate change concerns in report
A report from the Cambodia Agriculture Research and Development Institute, a semi-autonomous organisation, showed that 83 per cent of farmers surveyed in Kampong Speu, Kampot and Kampong Cham provinces had noticed the effects of climate change. Farmers in the three provinces emphasised that climate change reduced ...
Business operators lack faith in local economy
Investors have expressed a lack of confidence in Thailand’s economy because of a decline in exports, the drought-induced expected slowdown in domestic consumption, and the sluggish global economy. Somkiat Anuras, vice chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber’s Business Confidence Index was only ...
Drought relief campaign over: PM
The government’s emergency campaign to distribute water to some 2.5 million people affected by drought is over, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen declared on 25 May, though for development partners and humanitarian groups, drought relief efforts continue. Humanitarian and disaster reduction manager for Save the Children ...
Amid drought, diarrhea poses severe threat
Teachers at Toul Mead Primary School in Siem Reap province tell students to bring drinking water from home to keep them hydrated in the scorching heat. But water is increasingly hard to come by as the worst drought in decades drags on. There is no free ...
Livelihoods in jeopardy as Vietnam’s Mekong Delta struggles with sediment loss
The World Wide Fund for Nature reported that suspended sediment load in the Mekong Delta declined from 160 million tons in 1992 to 75 million tons in 2014 due to the construction of hydropower dams and reservoirs on the mainstream and branches of Mekong River. It noted that sand ...
Officials investigate fires in different regions
The cause of the fire, which spread from Ok mountain in Tambon Mae Nam to Phra mountain in Tambon Bor Phud of Surat Thani province, was suspected to be forest burning, which got out of control in the dry and hot weather. Up North, a Chiang ...
Digging deeper wells costs more
Amid a devastating drought, the need to dig more, and deeper, wells is threatening to overwhelm the government’s relief budget. The cost of wells rises exponentially with depth. And as groundwater continues to drop, itself exacerbated by the digging of more and more wells, deeper is ...
