Selected environmental stories from media outlets in the Mekong region and beyond.
Asean countries need to integrate appropriate safeguards to ensure inclusiveness and sustainability in any benefits to be brought about by the Asean Economic Community (AEC), experts said recently.
At a Bangkok symposium on “Shared solutions: Safeguarding sustainable development in the Mekong region”, Venkatachalam Anbumozhi, senior energy economist at the Economic Research Institute for Asean and East Asia, said AEC will propel infrastructure investment in the Mekong region.
In mid August, many correspondents from Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, China, and Britain came to Mekong River Delta. They wanted to witness the impacts of climate change, sea level rise and certainly mainstream dams upstream Mekong River, affecting the granary, fish, and shrimp of the world.
Hundreds of kilometers of riverbank and shoreline in the Mekong River Delta are being eroded dramatically with hundreds and even thousands of hectars of land swept away annually. The place widely known as the field of Southeast Asia, annually produces 24-25 millions tonnes of rice (6-8 million tonnes of rice export) and 1.2 million tonnes of catfish, and 500,000 tonnes of shrimp, mostly for export. That field is being lost.
Across the open door of the immigration office, a black dog sleeps, his ears twitching. It is a slow day at the border, under the tropical afternoon sun.
There is a lone white concrete marker at Dawei’s Kilometre Zero, where storms come ashore from the Andaman Sea and where the long, unpaved road to Thailand begins.
There is little now auguring that the white marker will one day be at the centre of Dawei special economic zone (SEZ), a mammoth project more than one-quarter the size of Singapore. In its entirety it will cost billions of dollars to build, potentially creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and generating up to 5 percent of Myanmar’s GDP.
Troops assigned to a light infantry unit destroyed village fields in southern Cambodia’s Kampot province on Monday in a bid to expand the property used by a commune set up for retired army soldiers, sources said.
The Prey Lang Community Network, which works to protect Cambodian forests, has been selected by UNDP for an Equator Prize, for outstanding community organizing. In an interview with VOA Khmer, the group’s spokesman, Seng Sok Heng, says the government is “inactive” in protecting Cambodian forests, some of the last rainforest in Southeast Asia.
A top mining official on Wednesday urged the government of northeastern Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province to crack down on a group of Vietnamese running an illegal gold mining operation villagers and rights groups say is being protected by local authorities.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has signed to advise the government on environmental and social risk management for hydropower projects nationwide.
Environmental groups yesterday urged the government to seek greater legal clarity among the Mekong River countries about how they should share its resources.
