Environment and natural resources

It started with the water changing color. Soon after that, the fish began to die. When the villagers bathed, they became itchy and covered in sores like an allergic reaction. Later, women and farm animals in the area started having miscarriages at an unusually high ...

Just 50 metres from the Mekong, in the shadow of a discarded plastic cup, a lone chick sits camouflaged on the sand. It is a newly hatched small pratincole in Bueng Kan province, northeast Thailand.  “I recorded 15 nests on the beach, smaller numbers compared with previous ...

For many years the warning signs flashed the same message: the Mekong River, Southeast Asia’s main waterway, was headed toward environmental disaster. The 2,700-mile-long ribbon of water, scientists cautioned, could not withstand the onslaught of dam construction, overfishing, and pollution. Yet somehow the river that ...

Nearly 34 ha of planted forests in Quang Nam are to be cleared for the construction of the Song Tranh 4 hydropower plant. Photo by VnExpress/Dac Thanh. Central Quang Nam Province has approved the conversion of nearly 35 hectares of forests into a hydropower plant and ...

The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh says it is concerned about deforestation in the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, where five environmental activists were detained for documenting illegal logging in February. Ambassador Patrick W. Murphy and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Cambodia Mission Director Veena Reddy ...

The government has green-lighted a VND2-trillion ($86.35 million) project to supply water to three provinces in the Mekong Delta. Long An, Tien Giang and Ben Tre provinces will get 300,000 cubic meters of water daily when the project is completed this year, and double that from ...

All Thai factories should have Green Industry certification by 2025, according to a deadline set by Industry Minister Suriya Juangroongruangkit on Tuesday. Suriya ordered the Department of Industrial Works (DIW) to push all 71,130 industrial plants across the country to achieve Green Industry standards developed by ...

A new monitoring platform that uses satellite imagery to track dam reservoir levels on the Mekong can shed light on the contentious issue of how the river’s precious water is stored, and the effects of climate change. The disruption to water and sediment flows along the ...

Indochinese leopards and tigers seem to have disappeared from their natural habitat in Cambodia, a conservationist told Khmer Times yesterday. “There is no scientific evidence since the 2010s to give us hope as conservationists to believe that Indochinese leopards and tigers still survive,” said the Cambodian conservationist who ...

Local communities along the Mekong River are asking the government to establish a fund, made up of collected tax revenues from development projects on the waterway, to compensate villagers affected by them. “This fund [should] not be a corporate social responsibility scheme,” said Ormbun Thipsuna, president ...