Selected environmental stories from media outlets in the Mekong region and beyond.
Chinese state-funded renewable energy firms are spreading the net overseas, as quality new projects become harder to come by at home, and have already been successful in snapping up some prime operational projects, while bidding for others, both in developed and emerging markets.
The two most active are China General Nuclear Power Group, the nation’s largest nuclear reactor developer, and China Three Gorges, the country’s biggest hydro power projects developer.
While the media coverage of the environment in Cambodia is still limited, the Cambodian Environmental Journalism Network (CEJN) has urged media organizations to make more comprehensive coverage of the environment for the public in cooperation with the media in the neighboring countries.
Vietnam has strongly committed to develop renewable energy. Experts expect implementation of these commitments will create a “Resolution 10” for the energy sector. Resolution 10 is the name of a critically important Vietnamese reform in 1988. This policy helped to liberalize the freedom and the production potential in rural and agricultural economies.
Myanmar will get a new national environmental policy in early 2017, say officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation. The retooled version will update the 22-year-old policy currently in place.
USAID-supported Mekong Partnership for the Environment (MPE) partners have launched an innovative data portal in Myanmar. Open Development Myanmar is now available to the public and will aggregate and promote key development and environmental data about Myanmar, especially data with potential regional significance. The platform is the Myanmar sub-site of the major regional open data platform, Open Development Mekong, which gathers and contextualizes objective data on development trends in the Mekong region.
“Water is liquid capital” proclaims the lead-out of World Wide Fund for Nature’s new report “The Role of the Mekong in the Economy.” Released earlier this month at the 2016 Mekong Forum on Water, Food and Energy, the report’s findings stress that despite the Mekong’s central role to the economies of countries in the Lower Mekong Basin, river management decisions are not being coordinated with long term economic development, nor planning efforts. Unless decision makers start considering the connections between water choices and economic development, the region’s prosperity seems destined for trouble.
We live today in the most explosive era of infrastructure development in human history. By mid-century the unprecedented rate of highway, dam, mine and power plant construction; along with city growth, will girdle the globe in concrete. Arguably, that burst of activity will improve the lives of millions. But it is also coming at a terrible cost to the natural world, as we lose the rainforests, estuaries, wetlands, wildlife and indigenous people of our planet.
Myanmar Rivers Network has called for the suspension of construction on mega dam projects, a special economic zone and extraction of value-added mineral resources until a federal agreement is signed.
At a press conference at the Orchid Hotel on December 7, the network released a statement saying that the respective governments and companies must give full compensations to villagers who had been moved by force because of previous dam construction projects.
Before reaching the Keng Kham valley, the bright green Pang river, the Salween’s major tributary running south through central Shan state, splits into three parallel rivers that form myriad channels creating islands and islets, blurring the line between forests and water in a pristine and biodiverse riverscape. Rarely seen by outsiders, these are the famed “thousand islands,” forming a stunning inland delta that gives the “Kunhing” township its name. To the south, the Pang meets the Salween in a cascade of waterfalls. Seen from the air, white water tumbles down through verdant forested islands on an escarpment hundreds of meters long.
The Mekong basin is being stirred up by dams, both on the mainstream and tributaries, despite the warning that they pose serious threats to an ecologically and agriculturally vital area of the world. Experts say a basin scale vision is crucial for good water governance, but when will it become a reality?
