Environment and natural resources

An old friend of Thailand has returned from the sea, but vast drifts of plastic block more leatherback turtles from coming ashore to spawn. The news from Kuek Kak Beach on the Phang-nga coast in mid-February delighted marine ecologist Dr Thon Thamrongnawasawat as twenty newly hatched ...

The Mekong Butterfly had a heart-to-heart talk with 6 people of the Mekong — they are from 6 different communities in Thailand located on the Mekong riverbank. Despite informal atmosphere, topics of the discussion were very earnest around problems they have been facing from irregular ...

I was on a 3-month bike ride across five countries of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand , Cambodia and Nepal, to challenge the everyday use of plastic through an activity called Plogging – a mix of jogging and picking up trash.  Dwarfed by the five-feet jumble of trash ...

The water tastes salty and the rice barely grows in the coastal villages of the Ca Mau peninsula at the southern tip of Vietnam’s Mekong River delta. Thi Tran, a young woman who farms 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of rice and vegetables while her husband works ...

Located at the end of the Mekong River, the Mekong Delta is the most prosperous agricultural production region in Southeast Asia. However, it is also one of the areas most heavily affected by climate change. Rising sea levels, saline intrusion, droughts, and landslides have occurred ...

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) said on Monday that the river’s water level in Kratie province is expected to decrease by 50cm to 1.5m from April 12-19, as the outflow from China’s Jinghong hydropower station is gradually reduced by half to accommodate the Dai ethnic ...

Rates of growth and loss in mangrove forests are higher than previous estimates, according to satellite measurements of the Rufiji, Zambezi, Ganges and Mekong deltas. And natural expansion and growth of new mangrove forests could partially compensate for declines caused by human activity. “What we see ...

For decades, Cambodia’s Mekong River population of Irrawaddy dolphins has verged on extinction. Once believed to have numbered in the thousands, the population began to plummet in the 1970s. During the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge and the years of war that followed, the dolphins were ...

Unlike the smog that enveloped Bangkok early in the year, the haze crisis in the North stems largely from spontaneous dry-season forest fires and other fires deliberately set to clear farmland. GISDA has found that the number of hotspots in nine northern provinces including Chiang Mai ...

The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) marked its third anniversary last week with the announcement that China’s trade with the five Mekong member countries – Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – has reached over US$260 billion for the period, highlighting the overarching role China plays in ...