Environment and natural resources
Climate change
National climate change strategy reviewed
The Department of Climate Change under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment cooperated with the French Development Agency (AFD) in organising a seminar in Hanoi on June 24 to review the implementation of the national strategy and action plan on climate change and propose orientations to cope with ...
New study shows loss of Southeast Asia’s peat forests drives climate change
A new study by researchers in Singapore from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) uses satellite data to show just how rapidly Southeast Asia’s vital peat forests are being cleared, drained and dried out. The paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, uses remote sensing to document how peatlands ...
Skylar Lindsay
Opinion: Building climate resilience for malaria elimination
Climate Change is one of the biggest threats humanity has ever faced. By all accounts, and if not mitigated, it will have a devastating impact on life as we know it: rising sea levels that inundate coast lines causing mass migration on a level never ...
Vaibhav Gupta
Sea-level rise likely to swallow many coastal mangrove forests
Coastal mangrove forests aren’t adapting rapidly enough to escape rising sea levels, and many could disappear by 2050 in much of the tropics, according to recent research published in Science. Authors of a study reported June 5 used sediment cores from 78 sites on five continents ...
Jeff Masters, Ph.D.
South-East Asia’s biggest river is drying up
ish writhe frantically in the shallow pool, as their schoolmates stranded on the exposed sandbar breathe their last. It is November, the end of the monsoon season, yet the water in the Mekong river is perilously low. On this stretch, in north-eastern Thailand, the bank is ...
EU, France back Vietnam in fight against climate change
The European Union and the French Development Agency (AFD) have established a 20-million-euro ($21.5 million) fund to help Vietnam deal with climate change. The EU will provide the money as a non-refundable grant to the AFD to run the fund. The latter will in turn provide loans ...
Nguyen Quy
Mekong Delta residents flee as nature turns hostile
Their ancestors had come to settle the Mekong Delta, turning it into the nation’s agriculture and aquaculture hub, but now they are fleeing. At three in the morning, Dang Van Binh, 34, wakes up in his hut by a river in An Phu Trung Commune in ...
Hoang Nam, Pham Linh
Researchers reconstruct drought variability from teak tree rings in Southern Myanmar
Teak (Tectona grandis) is a tropical, deciduous, broad-leaved tree species indigenous to Southeast Asia. Despite its high dendroclimatological potential, only a few studies have analyzed the relationships between teak ring-width and climate variability in Myanmar. In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical ...
Zhang Nannan, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Mekong Delta farmers switch to other crops in response to climate change
More farmers in the Mekong Delta have restructured their crop cultivation to adapt to the effects of climate change. The delta, the country’s largest rice, fruit and seafood producer, has faced severe drought and saline intrusion in recent years and local authorities have encouraged farmers to switch to ...
Climate stress and coronavirus gang up on world's vulnerable
With friends falling ill, another passing away and his movements restricted, coronavirus had already stretched Giordano Alpi physically and mentally when another disaster struck his 30-hectare farm in Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy. A sudden plunge in night-time temperatures to below zero in late March caused extensive ...
Thin Lei Win and Michael Taylor