News

Last week, China conducted another iteration of its joint patrols with three riparian countries in the Mekong River. The development spotlighted one aspect of Beijing’s continued effort to advance collaboration in the Mekong subregion and Southeast Asia more generally. As I have noted before, as China ...

The Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Mechanism (MLC) is a cooperation mechanism in line with the current trend of globalisation and integration. The MLC aims to promote comprehensive cooperation to build a community of responsibilities and common interests in the subregion. In addition, the MLC also has other goals ...

As societies around the world focus on containing the spread of the novel coronavirus, millions of people in Southeast Asia have another worry on their minds: How to put food on their table amid a devastating drought. In Thailand, historically low levels of rainfall since last summer have ...

The six countries in the Langcang-Mekong Region vowed to further enhance water resource cooperation in a video conference during the 2020 LMC (Lancang-Mekong Cooperation) Week activity that began on Monday. “At present, the novel coronavirus is spreading globally, and all countries in the world are fighting ...

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) was established in 1995 to strengthen joint efforts and partnerships for the sustainable management and development of water resources in mainland South-East Asia. The MRC includes Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, but not China. Beijing established the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism, to give ...

The number of hydropower dams has increased dramatically in the last 100 years for energy supply, climate change mitigation, and economic development. However, recent studies have overwhelmingly stressed the negative consequences of dam construction. Notably, it is commonly assumed that reservoirs retain nutrients, and this ...

China’s dams are worsening drought conditions downstream the Mekong River, storing and controlling up to 50 percent of its waters, experts say. China on average contributes around 14 percent of the Mekong River’s flow, “but an annual average can be misleading,” says Brian Eyler, director of ...

China on Thursday said it was helping its downstream neighbors cope with a prolonged drought by releasing more water from its dams on the Mekong River, adding it would consider sharing information on hydrology to provide further assistance in the future. The statement came as a ...

Vietnam and three Mekong neighbors will join hands to assess plastic waste leakage into the river system in a bid to fight plastic pollution in the region. Fifty government officials and university researchers from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam gathered to discuss assessment methodologies to study ...

Hydropower dams, which use flowing water to turn a series of turbines to generate electricity, provide a source of energy that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. But they also disrupt the flow of rivers, and impact the fish and people that live there. Scientists have been ...