News

Being landlocked and poor has always placed Laos at a disadvantage to its more powerful neighbors. The only body of water that offers Vientiane an international reach is the Mekong River, which flows through the heartland of Southeast Asia. Now, that river, which laps the western ...

Environmentalists have expressed disappointment at the outcome of the second Mekong River Commission (MRC) summit, which wrapped up yesterday. International Rivers, an environmental and human rights organisation, yesterday released a statement slamming regional leaders’ failure to address concerns over the proliferation of dams on the mainstream ...

Cambodia will probably call for a moratorium on the Laos’ 260-megawatt Don Sahong dam development project on the lower Mekong River during the second Summit of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), to be held on April 4 and 5 in Ho Chi Minh City of ...

In anticipation of a regional summit this weekend, government officials and civil society have their sights locked on a controversial hydropower development just across the Cambodian border in Laos. NGO Forum submitted an open letter yesterday urging Prime Minister Hun Sen to confront Laos about its ...

Kompong Cham authorities blocked several hundred activists from marching Monday to raise awareness about the environmental dangers raised by Don Sahong dam, officials and activists said. Kompong Cham provincial governor Lun Limthai confirmed that he banned the campaign. “We did not allow them to hold this ...

With time running short before Laos’s Xayaburi hydropower dam enters its final, potentially irreversible stages of construction, a group of NGOs has made another call for its suspension. In a joint declaration released today, 39 organisations based in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia set a one-year ...

Yin Vuth, one of hundreds of Cambodians who protested against the Don Sahong dam over the weekend, said that if construction on the project in Laos goes ahead, the fish will disappear, and once the fish disappear, the dolphins will be next. “All we will have ...

The Cambodian Fisheries Administration has begun a one-year study of a mollusc fishery in Kampong Chhnang province, the Mekong River Commission says. Launched in February and financed by the MRC Fisheries Programme, the pilot study aims to assess the status of the snail and clam fishery ...

The Mekong River Commission has documented 186 fish species identified by the Kunming Institute of Zoology as being found in the Upper Mekong Basin in China’s Yunnan province. A list of the species with their scientific and common Chinese names as well as their distribution in ...

Cambodian experts on Thursday expressed concerns over the Laos Don Sahong dam development project, saying the proposed hydroelectric dam would pose a serious threat to the existence of the biodiversity on the Mekong River in Cambodia. Some 90 conservationists, environmentalists, development partners, academia, fishery scientists, and ...

More than 100 representatives of Mekong River Commission (MRC) member countries, development partners, international NGOs, and Lao and foreign media yesterday visited the site of the planned Don Sahong hydropower project. The two-day site visit provided an opportunity for participants to learn from experts how fish ...

Production from freshwater capture fisheries and aquaculture in the Lower Mekong Basin is estimated to be worth up to $7 billion a year, the Mekong River Commission says. The newsletter said total first-sale value was estimated at $3.9 to $7.0 billion per year. “Over the ...

“From my view, I don’t want to have it, but it is development, we can’t stop them,” says Srekor’s village chief, Leang Saroeurn. Cambodia’s impressive yearly GDP growth rates of 7 percent for the last decade have come, in part, through a ravenous consumption of the countries ...

The conservation NGO WWF today slammed developers of the Don Sahong Hydropower project for providing “flawed” and scientifically unsound impact assessments. In an analysis released today, WWF criticised the hydropower project’s Environmental Impact Assessment and Social Impact Assessment, finding both “riddled with problems such as inappropriate ...

Cambodia’s floating villages have adapted to the ebb and flow of Southeast Asia’s largest lake for generations, but modernisation and a scarcity of fish are now threatening their traditional way of life. Houses, schools, hairdressers and even dentists — entire communities bob around on the Tonle ...

Construction of the Don Sahong hydropower project in southern Laos is likely to decimate an already dwindling population of critically endangered Mekong dolphins, according to a World Wildlife Fund science brief published today. About 85 dolphins inhabit a deep-water pool restricted to a stretch of the ...

Authorities in Kratie and Stung Treng provinces on Thursday said that they were investigating an unusual change of color in the Mekong River to a muddy, dark brown that was unnatural for this time of the year and was worrying residents. Since the beginning of this ...

The Mekong River Commission’s (MRC) study on the potential long-term effects of large-scale dam building on the Mekong River needs to be expedited, members of the MRC agreed at the Fifth Mekong-Japan Summit in Tokyo on Saturday. However, they did not set a date for the ...

Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand have all called on Laos to submit its planned Don Sahong hydropower dam to an intergovernmental assessment. According to the dam’s opponents, the Laos National Mekong Committee has acted unilaterally in the planning of its second Mekong dam, a project they fear ...

As Laos pushes toward its goal of becoming the “battery of Asia” through hydropower, its newfound claim that the location for the proposed Don Sahong dam is not on the Mekong River’s main stream is provoking incredulity from some observers. Less than two kilometres north of ...

Vietnam has joined Cambodia in questioning the sustainability of the planned Don Sahong dam project on the Mekong River in southern Laos, saying more environmental impact studies are needed before the scheme moves forward. Le Duc Trung, director general of the Vietnam National Mekong Committee under ...

A new study and accompanying short film released yesterday call for all lower Mekong dam developers to halt plans until further impact studies can be made. Hydropower dams will have a greater impact on river flows than even climate change, according to research by the University ...

Laos is pushing ahead with construction of a second dam on the Mekong River despite objections from environmental and civil society groups. Work on the main part of the Don Sahong hydropower dam near the Cambodian border in southern Laos will begin by the end of ...

Laos is taking steps to convince neighboring countries of the merits of the planned Don Sahong hydropower project over Mekong River. Lao government officials organized a site visit on Sunday and Monday so that interested parties could see the site first-hand and get a sense of ...