News
SE Asia slowly but surely sinking into the sea
Ho Chi Minh City is constantly flooded, while Bangkok continues to sink below sea level. It sounds like a science fiction movie set in Southeast Asia. But it’s what experts predict will happen within the next two to three decades in the major Vietnamese and Thai ...
Dan Southerland
Southeast Asia’s Water Troubles Underscore Climate Threat
Over the previous 12 months, rising environmental threats in Asia have had a lot to do with water—most significantly rising seas pushed by international warming. Southeast Asia is proving to be notably weak. New research present that local weather change and rising sea ranges will threaten the ...
Miriam Jackson
Illegal hunting a greater threat to wildlife than forest degradation
The world has long associated plummeting populations of Southeast Asian wildlife with news of forest degradation and poignant images of deforested lands. Recent studies, however, bring to light another human practice that’s been driving the decline of wildlife numbers in these ecosystems. Researchers from the Leibniz ...
‘Death by plastic’ for animals must spur Southeast Asia to tackle waste crisis
The animal is dead. It can be a fish, bird, mammal or reptile. An autopsy is conducted and inevitably reams of plastic are discovered in its stomach. When I wake up every morning, I step into my bathroom and survey the shelves. There are rows of ...
Karim Raslan
Dams and Climate Change Kill the Mekong
The swirling currents of the once mighty Mekong, shrunk by drought and increasingly crippled by dams point towards an unprecedented crisis of water governance along the more than 4,900 kilometers of southeast Asia’s longest river. “This is the worst ecological disaster in history of the Mekong,” declared ...
Tom Fawthrop
Southeast Asia and the right to safe water
On 6 November, the Mekong River Commission acknowledged that climate change had exacerbated this year’s wildly varying water levels on the Mekong – which saw the mighty river reduced to a trickle in parts, even during the rainy season. But the main contributor, it said, ...
Sam Geall
Southeast Asian countries need tougher plastic policies to curb pollution - U.N.
Southeast Asian countries, among the world’s worst ocean polluters, need tougher regulations for plastic packaging to curb leakage, a United Nations report said on Wednesday. Southeast Asia is a major contributor to land-based plastic waste leaking into the world’s oceans, with more than half of it ...
Patpicha Tanakasempipat
Illegal snares killing SE Asia wildlife
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 ...
China, Southeast Asian nations sign action document to eliminate malaria during World Health Assembly
Health officials from China, Myanmar, Cambodia, Lao, Thailand and Vietnam along with World Health Organization representatives on Tuesday signed the Ministerial Call for Action to Eliminate Malaria in the Greater Mekong Subregion before 2030. Keep reading ...
