Manythong Siharath is worried. The wetland she depends on for her livelihood is changing and changing fast! In recent years, fishing has become a lot harder and her income has dropped significantly. She like many others around the world faces a shrinking wetland while her problems only continue to grow.
Floods. It seems no matter where you turn these days, you can’t escape news of flooding in some part of the world. In the face of climate change and COP21, towns and cities all over the world must look to develop sustainably. Here's a look at green infrastructure issues in the Mekong.
"The Greater Mekong Forum serves as the primary interface between the technical work produced by WLE Mekong and potential users of that work," Kim Geheb discusses his thoughts on the forum.
Green infrastructure involves making conventional urban infrastructure more sustainable, cost effective, and resilient to climate change. But implementing such techniques, in less well-planned cities in Southeast Asia may prove to be more difficult than in western cities.
Publicly accessible satellite data gives water accounting a boost with the ultimate goal of being able to give water managers precise indications of where and when water is being “used” and allow them to plan accordingly.
In the Mekong Region, fast flowing rivers are often the lifeblood of nearby communities. They provide food, transportation, irrigation and spiritual needs. But a fast flowing river is also an opportunity to generate hydropower. To offset the ecological effects, could artificial wetlands benefit dam-side communities?
How do you incorporate local communities in research? Thaibaan Research is supporting villagers to design and carry out projects that they find important to their daily lives.
Today we head to Northern Myanmar where filmmaker Douglas Varchol reports from the field. Varchol joins a research team from the project on "Working together for a better Kachin landscape.”
Just one week before World Wetlands Day, at a meeting in Myanmar, Environment Ministers of the Greater Mekong Subregion reaffirmed their commitment to “green” economic growth. The challenge they recognized is ensuring not only sustainable growth but also inclusive and shared growth.
Most people have played some kind of game in their lifetime. Be it cards, monopoly, or Farmville, this unique form of entertainment allows us to escape reality and spend time focusing on inconsequential goals. But a new realistic game provides a platform for engaging in difficult conversation about cooperative water and land management.
Big dams have been taking a something of a pounding in recent weeks. A recent article in the New York Times by Scudder, an expert on dams and poverty alleviation, concluded that such behemoths were rarely worth the cost.
In southern Laos, rice fields are not only important for rice; they also harbour fish, frogs, insects, snails and plants, that are caught to supplement the diets of the farmers and their families. Government policy to increase rice production threatens the survival of these unrecorded food sources.
