Rivers and lakes

The problem with plastic waste just got more complicated—and so did the effort to stanch its flow into the world’s oceans. Rivers are the primary conduits for plastic waste to the seas. In 2017, two separate groups of scientists concluded that 90 percent of river-borne plastic ...

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has partnered with Google to fight plastic pollution in the Mekong River, leveraging citizen science and machine learning to understand the magnitude of the problem impacting the longest river in Southeast Asia. Aided by technical advisory support from Google, the CounterMEASURE ...

One recent mid-morning, Lev Pheng Ang, a 52-year-old mother who runs a grocery store on the bank of the Mekong River in Rakar Korng Muoy commune, Kandal province’s Muk Kampoul district, was running her business as usual when she heard a loud splash in the ...

Scientists working with the Wonders of the Mekong project have undertaken an ambitious initiative to catalogue the overlooked mollusc diversity in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, which was previously based on records from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their new report provides a much-needed update on ...

Through disasters, a fellowship was struck. Ormboon Thipsuna remembers the date well, Aug 12, 2008, when a deluge of water from the Mekong swept through her hometown of Nong Khai and seven riparian northeastern provinces. Considering the rainfall was rather small and the Mekong’s gradual ...

The northeast region of Thailand bordering Laos and Cambodia, is facing the consequences of dams on the Mekong River. Changes in the natural rhythms of the Mekong River has been hampered by the construction of dams upstream in China and Laos in recent years. The Mekong ...

Large numbers of people here in the dry northeast region of Thailand bordering Laos and Cambodia, a region known as Isaan, are facing the consequences of changes in the natural rhythms of the Mekong River wrought by the construction in recent years of dams upstream ...

The ambassadors of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia have called for greater support from the U.S. and the ASEAN regional bloc to address urgent environmental threats to the Mekong River. They also emphasized the need for improved water data sharing by all countries on the river, ...

For many years the warning signs flashed the same message: the Mekong River, Southeast Asia’s main waterway, was headed toward environmental disaster. The 2,700-mile-long ribbon of water, scientists cautioned, could not withstand the onslaught of dam construction, overfishing, and pollution. Yet somehow the river that ...

The government has green-lighted a VND2-trillion ($86.35 million) project to supply water to three provinces in the Mekong Delta. Long An, Tien Giang and Ben Tre provinces will get 300,000 cubic meters of water daily when the project is completed this year, and double that from ...