Disasters and emergency response

While the MRC is well established and recognised as the international treaty-based river basin organization and primary water diplomacy platform in the Mekong River basin, we still have opportunities to improve basin-wide cooperation. My priority is to further equip the MRC Secretariat with the facilitation ...

The Mekong has another point of origin: the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. Each year life springs from the lake, mostly in the form of a massive fish population that migrates to the far reaches of the Mekong system both upstream and downstream. This annual ...

The effects of climate change pose a direct threat to lives and livelihoods of people living in Vietnam, from death and injury to damaged or destroyed homes, businesses, transport links, power supplies and agricultural land. So academics from the University of Southampton, the University of ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030. This is projected to bring about changes in the climate and natural systems, including changes in the frequency and intensity of weather ...

From sea to source, the Mekong River stretches nearly 5,000 km through six countries. More than 60 million people depend on its waters for survival, and it is second only to the Amazon in its biodiversity. Photographers Gareth Bright and Luke Forsyth spent eighteen months travelling ...

THE WORLD needs to be prepared for more extreme weather events in future after disasters caused by climate change inflicted losses running into many billions of dollars in 2018, according to a study. The British organisation, Christian Aid, last Thursday released its new report titled “Counting ...

IN July, a hydroelectric dam collapse in Laos released five billion cubic meters of water into surrounding countryside – the equivalent of two million Olympic swimming pools. The resulting flood killed dozens, devastated communities, forced thousands to flee and ripped through areas of protected rainforest. The ...

 Sak Siam, 69, chief of Chnok Tru, a village in central Cambodia, is worried. The floating village of about 1,700 households is located on a tributary of the Mekong River. “The villagers will be unable to survive if the fish catch decreases further,” he said. Hydroelectric ...

A scientific seminar on land subsidence in the Mekong Delta – situation and solutions took place in Hanoi on December 28.  In his opening speech, Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Vo Tuan Nhan said climate change, riverside landslide and land subsidence are posing challenges ...

Laos’ worst flooding in decades — the rupture of a dam in July that inundated 12 villages and killed at least 43 people, leaving hundreds more missing – is still reverberating far away in the capital of the poor, landlocked country. Survivors of the flooding ...