Environment

Electricité du Cambodge has launched an international tender to procure a solar project in Kampong Chhnang province, on a build-own-operate basis. The project is the initial phase of the 100 MW National Solar Park, which is being supported by the Asian Development Bank.

Nearly the entire Mekong Delta in Vietnam — an area that helps feed about 200 million people — will sink underwater by the year 2100 at current rates, a new study predicts.

Southeast Asia Globe speaks with Emirates’ commercial manager in Cambodia, Abdulla Adnan, about what the world’s airlines can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

With so many eyes in the sky, residents living downstream from dams now have many ways to see—and prepare for—potential dangers.

The Asian Development Bank, which is backing the plant, is seeking project consultants. If built, the solar park would improve the country’s limited power supply and bring technical benefits to the national grid.

This year’s environmental news kicked off in grisly fashion: a Vietnamese poaching gang recording one of its members straddling and punching a snared and presumably dead tiger (the Thai authorities say they have caught the perpetrators) in one of Thailand’s protected areas.

Mondulkiri provincial environment department director Keo Sopheak has said that DNA testing will soon reveal the identities of poachers who exchanged gunfire with environmental rangers, injuring one, at Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary last Wednesday.

By far the largest mining endeavor globally is digging up sand, mainly for the concrete that goes into buildings. But this little-noticed and largely unregulated activity has serious costs — damaging rivers, wreaking havoc on coastal ecosystems, and even wiping away entire islands.

The Ministry of Environment has dismissed “rumours” that the current chronic smog gripping Thai capital Bangkok will spread to Cambodia, saying that, unlike its neighbour, the Kingdom does not have a serious air pollution problem.

Along with most Southeast Asian countries, Cambodia’s electricity consumption over the past decade has skyrocketed.

Bangkok is choking as military drones and fire trucks fight to bring air pollution under control. Schools have closed, people are encouraged to stay indoors and others have armed themselves with face masks.

The country is a key transit point for smugglers moving on to Vietnam and China, two of the world’s biggest markets for parts from endangered and protected species.

When floodwaters swept a chunk of riverbank into the Mekong just south of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, Sun Ramaly managed to save her clothes and her kitchen utensils. Her one-room shack, however, crumbled into the river.

Climate change, deforestation and rising sea-levels have been causing devastating rice shortages for Cambodia’s coastal communities.

Some of the hazardous PM2.5 plaguing Bangkok may be the result of crop burning in Cambodia, but officials stress vehicles are still the main cause.

More common in Asia and Africa than in western countries, tuk tuks are three-wheeled cars typically used as novelty taxis and for public transportation, powered either by biking or fuel.

This month’s discovery of trinkets carved from the tusks of extinct woolly mammoths is just the latest evidence that Cambodia is playing a growing role in the international illegal ivory trade.

The roar of the tiger has been replaced by the growl of the chain saw in Northeastern Cambodia’s Virachey National Park, along with the honking of great hornbills, which has been supplanted by the chirping of crickets.

The body of water, which relies on the Mekong reversing its flow to replenish supplies, provides most the country’s protein production. But overfishing and climate change threaten life on the lake.

In the dead of night, the entire front half of shopkeeper Ta Thi Kim Anh's house collapsed.