Chinadialogue.net

In May, Campaign for Nature announced that Southeast Asian nations were showing growing support for the goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. Dr Zakri Abdul Hamid is ambassador for the campaign, which is a partnership between the Wyss Campaign for ...

In March, Thailand announced it will draft a master plan to reach net zero carbon emissions. Though it has not set a date for net zero, that deadline will proably be announced in November at the COP26 UN climate talks. According to energy secretary Kulit Sombasiri, talking ...

Cambodia’s government has granted permission for a new special economic zone (SEZ) and coal-fired power plant within the lush Botum Sakor National Park in coastal Koh Kong province. The SEZ would create another loosely regulated industrial area within a biodiverse primary forest. Late last year, Koh ...

Svay Rieng, a town in south-eastern Cambodia, is both a gateway to Vietnam and for more than a decade now a hotbed of Cambodian industrial development. But a lack of compliance with environmental and labour regulations has raised tensions with local communities. The region is home ...

“We bury a GPS tracker in the wood. We call them rabbits,” says Cheewapap Cheewatham, director of Thailand’s Forest Protection and Fire Control Bureau, part of the forestry department. He tells China Dialogue that they used to just impound as evidence cut rosewood they found ...

China has been ramping up its investments with the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism, which – according to American officials – is an attempt to compete with the Mekong River Commission (MRC). A competition over who dominates scientific and technical knowledge of the river indicates an escalation in the complexity of ...

Across Southeast Asia, governments continue to view coal as a reliable and inexpensive energy source, despite the rapidly falling costs of renewable power and the growing number of companies making vocal commitments to meeting all their demand with it. These companies are clear about what ...

With far-reaching implications for the upcoming elections in Myanmar and with the US tentatively wading into river governance, the Mekong region has become a contentious staging ground for China’s wider goals in Southeast Asia.  Sebastian Strangio’s new book In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century draws ...

From the top of a low hill, farmer Pich Sophat points to an area scarred by excavators. Remnants of a house can still be seen in the centre of land being cleared for Cambodia’s Botum Sakor coal-fired power plant. A newly excavated ditch marking the site ...

“Water rises so fast and drops so fast because the water doesn’t flow naturally. It has huge impacts on us. It’s hard to catch any fish, and the fish cannot lay eggs,” says Prayoon Saen-ae, 62, head of a local fishermen group in Chiang Khan ...