Pollution and waste

NAN, Thailand: On clear mornings, at dawn, Ms Kanchanaporn Paeng-ud stands on a hillcrest where her family processes tapioca and looks out beyond the sweeping valleys across to neighbouring country Laos. On the horizon, some 20 km away, she can see what resembles billowing columns of ...

Under last year’s haze that shrouded the region and sent over two million people to hospital, concerned authorities and policymakers have started to dispel the myth that has lasted for over 16 years, demystifying it and discovering the root causes; the vastly burned forests and ...

As Indonesia faces another year of intensifying peatland fires, longstanding regional tensions around transboundary haze continue to envelop Southeast Asia. Neighboring Malaysia is concerned about the haze’s severity this year, urging joint regional action against rising air pollution levels. Malaysia’s vocal stance on the issue raises the question: ...

The Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) is gearing up to join forces with its ASEAN counterparts to combat air pollution, specifically honing in on the issue of fine particulate matter PM2.5. This announcement took flight during the annual ASEAN Air Chiefs Conference in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, which concluded ...

Industrial-scale maize cultivation to produce animal feed, one of the two main reasons behind annual smog in the three Lower Mekong countries, has grown on a massive scale, satellite data analysis has revealed. More than 11.8 million rai (4.7 million acres) of forested area in the ...

Marine pollution issues have impinged on Thailand‘s coastal regions, with increasingly alarming statistics emerging, according to updates from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Throughout last year, there were reports of 22 oil spill events within the Gulf of Thailand, and an astonishing 507 tonnes of various waste ...

KOH KONG, Cambodia — “I think there’s a 30% chance we’ll have trouble with the police,” said Ly Chandaravuth, an environmental activist with the outlawed group Mother Nature Cambodia. This was in August 2022, when Mother Nature Cambodia was planning a trip to Koh Kong Krao, ...

With the Phuket tourism industry well on the way to recovery and aiming to welcome 12 million tourist arrivals this year, the problem of food waste is seen as an increasingly critical issue. In an effort to reduce that waste, the Thai Organic Consumer Association ...

Farmers are encroaching on national parks and protected forests in Laos, burning and clearing large areas to make room for cassava crops. The demand for cassava has seen it become the most profitable agricultural product in Laos, as demonstrated by the country’s February trade figures: cassava ...

Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia have been asked to adopt stronger solutions to deal with plastic pollution in the Mekong River and its tributaries. The Mekong River Commission (MRC) said in a Wednesday report that the four member countries should establish a “joint, permanent mechanism to ...