News
Extended lockdown essential amid ongoing challenges: PM
Continuation of the existing tough measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak is essential, Prime Minister Phankham Viphavanh has said in a clear reference to the nationwide lockdown. The government has extended the lockdown for another 15 days until May 20. The Overall number of Covid-19 cases ...
Souksakhone Vaenkeo
Moody’s says Cambodia, ‘Stands Out’ for flood risks
Moody’s Investors Service has said Thursday that Cambodia was among three countries in the Asia-Pacific region most exposed to flood risks arising from climate change. In a statement received from Frankfurt, Moody’s said climate risks such as rising sea levels, droughts, floods and wildfires were particularly ...
Sao Da – AKP
Faced with climate challenges, Vietnamese rice farmers switch to shrimp
For years, Ta Thi Thanh Thuy toiled on a sliver of land sandwiched between the Mekong River and the South China Sea, a region widely known as Vietnam’s rice bowl, to grow the prized grain. But Thuy, along with many of her neighbours, has over the ...
Khanh Vu
4 Dams on the Upper Mekong in Yunnan, China: 2011-2019
These photos document the construction of four dams – from north to south, Wunonglong, Lidi, Tuoba, and Huangdeng (see map below) – along a 200-kilometer stretch of the upper Mekong in Yunnan, China, and the transformation of the river from a free-flowing current to a ...
Scott Ezell
Volatile Mekong threatens birds’ nests
The following story was written by Tyler Roney for Third Pole, a “multilingual platform dedicated to promoting information and discussion about the Himalayan watershed and the rivers that originate there.” Just 50 metres from the Mekong, in the shadow of a discarded plastic cup, a lone chick sits ...
Thaiger
The poor state of press freedom is stunting social progress in Southeast Asia
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released their annual ranking of the global state of press freedom earlier this month and Countries in Southeast Asia did poorly—none of the 11 countries in the ASEAN bloc scored above RSF’s “difficult situation” designation. RSF ranks countries based on a questionnaire given to ...
Zachary Frye
'Nature - based' farming a winner in Delta
Over the past three years, Kiên Giang Province, the Mekong Delta’s largest rice producer, has restructured cultivation methods on more than 24,000ha of rice fields to adapt to climate change and improve farmers’ incomes. The farmers, who had typically planted two or three rice crops a year, switched to either rotating the ...
Tôn Ánh Thu
Urgent responses to climate change in the Mekong river are required
With rapid economic development, exponential population growth, urbanisation, industrialisation, and increased agricultural production in the region, the demand for water and river-based resources has dramatically increased, which gives rise to environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and struggles among diverse groups of resource users including local people, ...
Keo Piseth
At Vietnam’s southern tip, mangroves defend the land from the encroaching sea
Seen from above, Cape Ca Mau National Park, at Vietnam’s southernmost point, juts into the Gulf of Thailand like a verdant green toe. This dark green shade is created by an expansive, ecologically vital mangrove forest. But the province the park sits in, also called Ca ...
Michael Tatarski
Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers
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 ...
LAURA PARKER