Energy
Climate change: efforts to halt rise in global temperatures may be too late to save key glaciers, report warns
Glaciers in UN World Heritage sites are among those likely to disappear by 2050 as a result of global warming – regardless of efforts to limit the rise in global temperatures, scientists have warned. Researchers fear their loss is likely to have a devastating impact on vital waterways ...
Holly Chik
Vietnam struggles to break one of world's biggest coal addictions
Despite Vietnam’s solar boom and ambitious climate targets, the fast-growing economy is struggling to quit dirty energy – leaving one of the world’s biggest coal power programmes largely intact. During the COP26 climate summit last year, the government boldly promised to end the construction of new ...
AFP/fh
The cost of Laos’ quest to be Southeast Asia’s ‘battery’, and the World Heritage town at risk
With electricity exports to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia and even Singapore, Laos has arguably realised its ambition to be the battery of Southeast Asia. The bulk of these exports are from hydropower. Nearly 80 dams dot the landlocked country, and more along the Mekong River are in ...
Lee Li Wan
Climate change and dams force older residents to leave Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
At 63, Nguyen Thi Ngoc got her first full-time ‘company’ job as a security guard in Ho Chi Minh City. She’d never been to a city before taking the job in early 2021, but the former farmer, originally from the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, ...
Nhung Nguyen
Mekong Delta highly likely to face large-scale petroleum supply disruption
In recent days, many petrol filling stations in the Mekong Delta region have closed and stopped selling, partly because of losses, and partly because of supply shortages, leading to the prospect of large-scale disruptions in the region. Along the Nam Song Hau route from the Mekong Delta City ...
staff writers – Translated by Anh Quan
Will the Mekong River Really Become the Next South China Sea?
In recent years, the fate of Southeast Asia’s great river – the Mekong – has attracted growing international scrutiny. The Mekong faces many challenges, from the impacts of climate change and saline encroachment in its delta, to dam developments on the headwaters of the river ...
Sebastian Strangio
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
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
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
Minebea Cambodia announces $45M, 50MW solar farm
Japanese-owned electronics manufacturer Minebea (Cambodia) Co Ltd has unveiled plans for a $45 million 50MW solar farm to power its production and feed into the national grid, in support of eco-friendly, renewable energy source development. Minebea Cambodia operates a single factory in the Kingdom, in the ...
Hom Phanet
