Asia Times

A heavy mist hung over the Mekong River as the first arrest under Thailand’s new Wildlife Preservation and Protection Act took place at Cham Pong Pier, the entry point for the Cham Pong morning market. This market, located in Wiang Kaen district, Chiang Rai province, ...

A confluence of drought and dams along the Mekong River has renewed concerns about the future of the 4,700-kilometer waterway, upon which tens of millions of people depend for their livelihoods in China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The number of dams impeding the Mekong’s flow ...

The animals of Southeast Asia’s tropical rainforests are under threat. As if deforestation and habitat degradation weren’t enough to contend with, cheap, easy-to-produce illegal snares are being set at an alarming rate in the last refuges for wildlife in the region, indiscriminately killing and maiming ...

The Mekong River, a waterway that originates in China and snakes through five Southeast Asian countries, is emerging as a new security flashpoint, similar in dynamic to escalating conflicts in the South China Sea. China has built 11 dams and has plans for another eight along ...

A recent decision by a Thai appellate court against 14 residents of Ban Sapwai, a village in the northeastern province of Chaiyaphum, proves again that peasant women are bearing the brunt of false climate-change solutions. Instead of committing to the goal of mitigating climate change by phasing ...

Civil society groups in three countries have called for construction to stop on a dam in southern Laos where a major collapse occurred last year, killing more than 70 people and leaving about 5,000 villagers homeless. The groups say thousands displaced by the disaster at the Xe-Pian ...

Tourists, gamblers, traders and others can now travel by train between Bangkok and the Thai-Cambodian border for the first time since tracks were cut 45 years ago at the end of the US-Vietnam War. The new rail link ends one of the last infrastructural disruptions caused ...

When the state tabloid China Daily ran a paid advertisement in the New York Times extolling the virtues of Beijing’s proliferating dams in Laos, the piece sparked a new cold war controversy. Entitled “Employment on hydroelectric project in Laos delivers better lives”, the piece stated that ...

Across the river from Myanmar’s colonial-era old capital of Yangon, low-slung shanties dot rice fields that extend into a bucolic rural distance. But that could soon change if local property developers and their deep-pocketed Chinese backers build the Yangon New City Project, an ultra-modern design with ...

Dramatic forest degradation and loss in the Greater Mekong region have both their causes and potential solutions rooted in forest governance, according to a recent publication by researchers from the Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC), the University of British Columbia, and WWF. (The full ...