Environment and land

Construction minister rejects claims of a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, a hub for Chinese investment.Minister for Construction U Win Khaing told the Asean and Asia Forum in Singapore on Thursday that his country needed to improve its infrastructure quickly to cope with the ...

The Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) in partnership with the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) have published a detailed report entitled The Socio-Economic Atlas of Myanmar.For the first time, the report will provide official details and statistics on Myanmar’s geography, population and climate ...

Businesses in Southeast Asia are increasingly counting the cost of land grabs, more than half of which result in delayed projects and nearly three-quarters of which lead to lawsuits, according to a wide-ranging research report. Out of a sample of 51 major land disputes surveyed across ...

Cambodia and Vietnam currently lack a system to effectively forecast and control flooding in the Sesan and Srepok river basins, both at the national and intergovernmental level, according to a study published by the Mekong River Commission (MRC). Keep reading   ...

Banks and regulators in Southeast Asia should strengthen financial-sector rules and guidelines to promote funding for environment-friendly projects in a region threatened by deforestation and climate change, the World Wildlife Fund said. Keep reading ...

Myanmar’s special economic zones (SEZs) are a central part of a revitalized economic strategy in which increased manufacturing activity will play a key role. And breathing renewed life and energy into stagnant or stalled SEZs has moved to the top of the government’s agenda. “SEZs promote ...

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has pledged $1 billion to the Mekong Delta to fund projects aimed at tackling climate change amid warnings that the country’s rice basket is disappearing. The funding will come from the State budget, the World Bank, and other sources, he told ...

The fastest growing ivory market in the world is now Laos, according to an investigation by Kenya-based group Save the Elephants. China is banning all ivory trade by the end of 2017, but business is booming in neighboring countries. Investigators visited a Chinese casino resort ...

Myanmar’s government will manage the redevelopment of villages torched during violence in Rakhine state that has sent nearly half a million Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh, a minister was reported on Wednesday as saying. “According to the law, burnt land becomes government-managed land,” Minister for ...

Thirty million people depend for a living on the Mekong, the great Asian river that runs through Southeast Asia from its origins in the snowfields of Tibet to its end in the delta region of Vietnam, where it fertilizes one of the world’s richest agricultural ...