Environment and natural resources
Climate change
Laos intensifying efforts in agriculture climate change response
The government is accelerating efforts to boost farmers’ yields to meet national food security strategy and production targets by 2020 in response to global climate change. Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Dr Lien Thikeo made the statement during a recent address to mark World Food Day. He ...
Ounkham Pimmata
Will ASEAN be underwater by 2050?
With 80 percent of the region surrounded by water, ASEAN regularly faces water-related disasters such as floods, cyclones and storms – which are heightened by climate change. Greenhouse gases (GHG) are progressively warming the environment, and melting ice sheets and glaciers are increasing the volume of ...
Jason Thomas
Eating less meat can fight climate change
Food has an environmental impact. A 2018 study by J. Poore and T. Nemecek titled ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,’ published by the University of Oxford revealed that food production is responsible for 26 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing ...
Liyana Hasnan
Mekong Coffee Growers Struggle with Drought and a Warming Climate
In villages around the city of Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnamese farmers wait for the monsoon that normally arrives in April or May. “The fruits look ripe outside, but the bean is crispy and small because there was not enough rain,” says 28-year-old Y Bel Eban from Krong village, ...
Karoline Kan
Will climate change spell the end of coal and hydropower in the Mekong?
This year has been rough for the 70 million people who call the Mekong River basin home: a severe drought rocked the region for months before yielding to deadly flooding. The Mekong slowed to its lowest level in recorded history, knocking the world’s largest freshwater fishery—Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake—out of ...
Skylar Lindsay
Climate Change is causing dire consequences for the Greater Mekong region
The consequences of climate change is getting worse as each day passes. From shrinking ice caps to drawn out drought seasons, it seems that every country across the globe has experience some sort of impact from the drastic changes in weather patterns. And one of climate change’s victims, Southeast Asia’s ...
Mae Yen Yap
At a Cambodian Lake, a Climate Crisis Unfolds
When I first met Ly Heng in May 2016, the forest behind his house was still smoldering — the remnants of the worst drought to hit Southeast Asia in decades. Heng lived along a small river at the top of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, in a protected ...
Abby Seiff
Mekong Delta agriculture adapts to climate change
The Mekong Delta has restructured agriculture towards climate-change adaptation and market demand by establishing specialised farming areas for its key agricultural products, and by growing other crops on ineffective rice fields or rotating rice with other crops on the same field. The delta, the country’s largest rice, seafood ...
Cambodia's lifeline threatened as Mekong recedes to historic low
As world leaders meet in New York from Monday to discuss the global challenge of climate change, thousands of kilometres away people in Cambodia are grappling with dramatic changes to the country’s ecosystem, including the lowest water levels in the crucially-important Mekong River ever recorded. The United Nations Development Programme, ...
Andrew Nachemson
Confronting the new climate reality in Asia and the Pacific
ON Monday, world leaders will gather at the UN in New York for the Climate Action Summit. Their goal is simple – to increase ambition and accelerate action in the face of a mounting climate emergency. For many this means ambition and action that enables countries to ...