Environment and natural resources

Located at the end of the Mekong River, the Mekong Delta is the most prosperous agricultural production region in Southeast Asia. However, it is also one of the areas most heavily affected by climate change. Rising sea levels, saline intrusion, droughts, and landslides have occurred ...

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) said on Monday that the river’s water level in Kratie province is expected to decrease by 50cm to 1.5m from April 12-19, as the outflow from China’s Jinghong hydropower station is gradually reduced by half to accommodate the Dai ethnic ...

Rates of growth and loss in mangrove forests are higher than previous estimates, according to satellite measurements of the Rufiji, Zambezi, Ganges and Mekong deltas. And natural expansion and growth of new mangrove forests could partially compensate for declines caused by human activity. “What we see ...

For decades, Cambodia’s Mekong River population of Irrawaddy dolphins has verged on extinction. Once believed to have numbered in the thousands, the population began to plummet in the 1970s. During the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge and the years of war that followed, the dolphins were ...

Unlike the smog that enveloped Bangkok early in the year, the haze crisis in the North stems largely from spontaneous dry-season forest fires and other fires deliberately set to clear farmland. GISDA has found that the number of hotspots in nine northern provinces including Chiang Mai ...

The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) marked its third anniversary last week with the announcement that China’s trade with the five Mekong member countries – Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – has reached over US$260 billion for the period, highlighting the overarching role China plays in ...

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE), together with relevant ministries and agencies, is accelerating the building of a master plan for the Mekong Delta’s sustainable development in adaption to climate change to 2030 with a vision to 2050. The master plan will serve as ...

When complaints are made about the haze crisis and air pollution in Southeast Asia, most usually think about fires in Indonesia’s provinces, which have been a recurrent problem for over two decades. However, the situation this year has been different as Thailand has been at the ...

In recent times, plastic straws have been shunned due to its impact on marine animals. Now, numerous purportedly more eco-friendly alternatives to plastic straws have sprouted, such as metal straws and rice straws. One rather innovative solution that has surfaced are straws made out of grass. In a ...

An activist who has been fighting for years against the planned dredging of sections of the Mekong River for greater shipping access has called on the authorities to clarify the status of the project, which was supposed to have been cancelled following a meeting between ...