Water

People living in the Mekong Delta are installing tanks to store water for the dreaded dry season, and authorities are building artificial lakes. Pham Van Tien opens the cement tank which has rainwater from the previous night. During the last dry season Tien’s family and some ...

Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium opens with sound: an outboard motor puttering in the dark. The tea-brown, silt-clouded water of the Mekong appears, gliding beneath the prow of a little boat. Lines from the great poet Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener lap the screen, concluding: “Why did the ...

Two events happened last month that went largely unnoticed by most of the mainstream media in Southeast Asia. One was the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Leaders’ Meeting between China and the five Mekong members of Asean — Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The other ...

Over the past few months, the Irrigation Department and the House Committee Review of Integrated River Basin Management have been heavily promoting an inter-basin water diversion scheme. Planned projects will divert water across Thailand, incorporating international river basins, including the Mekong and Salween, to address ...

India will fund seven water management projects at a cost of around $350,000 in four Mekong Delta provinces. They are part of a non-refundable aid program for quick-impact projects under the framework of the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC), which aims to provide direct socio-economic benefits to communities ...

Yan Khouvry was out fishing till 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning. He had set out late morning on Monday and plied the waters near Koh Dach all day and night. He returned with just two fish. Later on Tuesday morning, around 10 a.m., he was preparing ...

Prior to 2020, the 2019 wet season was one of the driest on record. The annual reversal of the Tonle Sap in Cambodia was severely delayed in 2019 but low rainfall plus upstream dam regulation (mostly from China’s 11 mainstream Mekong dams) have totally erased ...

Hydropower is the world’s largest source of energy generation. It is commonly assumed that hydropower reservoirs retain nutrients, and this nutrient reduction significantly reduces primary productivity, fishery catches and food security downstream. An international research team, including Prof. Jef Huisman from the University of Amsterdam, ...

More than a hundred families in central Laos’ Bolikhamxay province who were displaced by the Nam Theun 1 dam have decided to accept compensation, putting an end to a standoff that lasted 17 months, sources in Laos told RFA. Disputes over compensation by displaced villagers have ...

Nakhon Ratchasima: The Office of the National Water Resources (ONWR) yesterday kick started public consultations to draw up a water-management plan for the Moon River Basin. The plan is urgently needed to tackle severe drought and floods in 10 northeastern provinces, it says. The first consultation, which ...