Environment and natural resources

The Mekong River Commission(MRC) yesterday said the water levels across the vast majority of lower Mekong basin have now returned to their normal long-term averages. The announcement was made after the MRC last month called member countries and Dialogue Partners to improve the management of the ...

Last year, while parts of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and southern Vietnam experienced a devastating drought, China held abundant water on the Upper Mekong River back from downstream communities, wiping out crops and fishing stock and bringing one of the world’s great waterways to its knees. At ...

Situation As Thailand and the rest of the world continue to fight the COVID 19 pandemic, the North of Thailand is fighting a different battle. For over two months now provinces in the north have been blanketed by haze and smoke from ravaging forest fires. Forest fires ...

In late 2018, following a series of demonstrations and confrontations, indigenous communities primarily from the Rawang ethnic minority expelled the Myanmar Forest Department and its international partner, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), from an area known as the Hkakaborazi Landscape, amid mounting dissent over a ...

Teak (Tectona grandis) is a tropical, deciduous, broad-leaved tree species indigenous to Southeast Asia. Despite its high dendroclimatological potential, only a few studies have analyzed the relationships between teak ring-width and climate variability in Myanmar. In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical ...

China’s upstream activities along the Mekong River have long been contentious — but a recent study has sparked fresh scrutiny over its dam-building exercises, reigniting warnings that millions of livelihoods could be destroyed. A U.S.-government funded study by research and consulting firm, Eyes on Earth, found that Chinese dams ...

As the Tonle Sap floodplain empties into the Mekong this spring, the Cambodians who rely on these waters face bleak prospects, with fish catches reportedly 10 to 20% of previous years. Blame for the precipitous decline in the ecology has been put on the many hydropower projects ...

Southeast Asian countries would have likely experienced a much less severe drought last year if it were not for China’s dams, a new study says, prompting a pushback from the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission (MRC). The 4,000-km (2,485-mile) Mekong is one of the world’s longest rivers – ...

While attention is focused on the coronavirus pandemic, we must also be alert to another fast-spreading hazard claiming lives — wildfires. Several people died this year fighting fires in northern Thailand. Now, hundreds of fires are burning there, in Laos and Myanmar. We expect more fires ...

As the largest urban area in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City is known for its kinetic pace of life, rivers of motorbike traffic, and relentless construction. With an official population of 9 million and a booming economy based on manufacturing, real estate and tourism, there ...