Environment and land

The ambassadors of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia have called for greater support from the U.S. and the ASEAN regional bloc to address urgent environmental threats to the Mekong River. They also emphasized the need for improved water data sharing by all countries on the river, ...

Rainforest Trust is working with Asian Arks to conserve the Khoun Xe Nong Ma National Protected Area that was recently declared by the Government of Lao PDR. The KXNM area covers approximately 133,000 acres of the Upper Xe Bang Fai-Laos Key Biodiversity Area in the ...

Around 230 families from three villages in Romtom commune of Preah Vihear province’s Rovieng district said they are worried about the continued encroachment on their farmland by three companies which have licences for gold mining and agricultural in the area. The villageres said they had been ...

It started with the water changing color. Soon after that, the fish began to die. When the villagers bathed, they became itchy and covered in sores like an allergic reaction. Later, women and farm animals in the area started having miscarriages at an unusually high ...

Three leading climate and human rights nonprofits have asked the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to pursue rampant “land grabbing” by the government of Cambodia and its commerce partners as a crime against humanity under the court’s jurisdiction. In an open letter ...

Just 50 metres from the Mekong, in the shadow of a discarded plastic cup, a lone chick sits camouflaged on the sand. It is a newly hatched small pratincole in Bueng Kan province, northeast Thailand.  “I recorded 15 nests on the beach, smaller numbers compared with previous ...

For many years the warning signs flashed the same message: the Mekong River, Southeast Asia’s main waterway, was headed toward environmental disaster. The 2,700-mile-long ribbon of water, scientists cautioned, could not withstand the onslaught of dam construction, overfishing, and pollution. Yet somehow the river that ...

Nearly 34 ha of planted forests in Quang Nam are to be cleared for the construction of the Song Tranh 4 hydropower plant. Photo by VnExpress/Dac Thanh. Central Quang Nam Province has approved the conversion of nearly 35 hectares of forests into a hydropower plant and ...

Some 150 hectares (370 acres) of coconut groves in Ben Tre Province have been damaged by a caterpillar species endemic to India and Sri Lanka. In mid-March trunks of dead coconut trees could be seen scattered along either side of National Highway 60 in Chau Thanh ...

The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh says it is concerned about deforestation in the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, where five environmental activists were detained for documenting illegal logging in February. Ambassador Patrick W. Murphy and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Cambodia Mission Director Veena Reddy ...