News
Gridlocked and flood-prone, Vietnam’s biggest city struggles to keep pace with its own breakneck growth
As soon as the roads are widened a fresh glut of cars moves in to fill them, says lifelong Ho Chi Minh City resident Thinh Pham, who fears urban planning is forever condemned to lag behind the unrelenting growth of one of Southeast Asia’s most ...
Michael Tatarski
Two-week old dolphin calf spotted in Mekong
A dolphin calf, about two weeks old, was spotted on Sunday in one of the Mekong River’s deep pools in Kratie province by the research team of the Fisheries Administration and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who confirmed the sixth calf recorded this year. Ouk Vibol, Director ...
Torn Vibol
Can Mekong Stingrays Tell the Chinese Dam Story Well?
Can a giant stingray in the Lower Mekong be used to craft a good narrative about Chinese upstream dams? It can, according to an unsigned Khmer Times article in June 2022 about a 300-kilogramme stingray found in Cambodia’s Stung Treng province. The article quoted Zeb Hogan, ...
HOANG THI HA
Cambodian mega dam’s resurrection on the Mekong ‘the beginning of the end’
A long-dormant plan to build a mega dam on the mainstream of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province appears to have been revived this year, leaving locals immediately downstream of the potential sites worried and experts confounded. First studied in 2007, the 1,400-megawatt ...
Gerald Flynn, Nehru Pry
Vietnam loses sacred cranes after habitat change
Twenty years ago, Nguyen Van Liet took scientists to the wetlands near his hometown of Tram Chim on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to find sarus cranes, a vulnerable bird species according to the IUCN Red List, native to Southeast Asia, South Asia and Australia. “We had to ...
Tran Nguyen
Inequality, Discord and Insecurity in Myanmar’s ‘Sacrifice Zone’
Recent reports by Global Witness and AP news highlight severe environmental destruction by unregulated and illegal rare earths extraction (REE) in northeastern Myanmar bordering China. “There is a name for what Myanmar has become: A “sacrifice zone,” or a place that destroys itself for the good of the world. ...
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY MYANMAR
Ministry proposes importing electricity from Laos
Electricity imports from Laos should be taken into account due to a possible power shortage in northern Vietnam from 2022 to 2025, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Ministry of Industry and Trade has written to the Prime Minister proposing a plan to ...
The Saigon Times
Mekong nations look for bridge over ‘ASEAN development gap’
Giving equal momentum to development remains the major topic that the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) nations – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV) – will discuss at the 54th ASEAN Economic Ministers’ (AEM) Meeting, slated to kick off on September 14 in Siem Reap town. Pen ...
Eng Reachny
Mekong group upgrades flood forecasting tool
The Mekong River Commission has updated its monitoring and flood forecasting front page to provide better information on the Mekong conditions. The commission’s Flood and Drought Forecast and Monitoring page has recently been revitalized since the last improvement in 2018 with a new interface, the MRC, ...
Minh Nga
In the Mekong Basin, an ‘unnecessary’ dam poses an outsized threat
“I remember seeing a buffalo, its head tied to a floating barrel, drifting down the river,” says Pheng Sisuwath, gesturing to the Sekong River from his stilt house in Cambodia’s northeastern province of Stung Treng. That was four years ago, when one of the auxiliary dams ...
Gerald Flynn, Nehru Pry
