Environment

No tigers made an appearance but this little fellow emerged from across the stream while I was at a lookout tower in Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand.

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There are only about 250 tigers in the wild left in Thailand and around 3,200* globally. Not a single one made an appearance when I covered the Global Tiger Initiative’s Regional Training on the Smart Patrol System at the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary but I learned more about tigers then than I ever did at a zoo.

Cũng có ở Tiếng việt

Pop singer Ngoc Khue and MC My Linh, along with 80 volunteers, took part in a flash mob to support the ‘I Hate Nylon’ project.

These days, when most people in Vietnam stay home to celebrate the Lunar New Year (locally known as Tet holiday), hundreds of Vietnamese youth flocked to the streets of Hanoi, the country’s capital, to work on a community project to reduce plastic bag usage in the city.

The ‘I Hate Nylon’ project (plastic bags are commonly called nylon bags in Vietnam) aims to raise Vietnamese people’s awareness about the dangers of plastic bag usage through several community activities before the Lunar New Year, the biggest holiday in Vietnam when people consume a lot of plastic bags.

It’s been an unusually severe rainy season in some parts of Lao PDR, with several typhoons passing over after making landfall in

Vietnam.  Thailand is also severely hit, with Bangkok bracing itself for floods as I write this. Floods are a regular part of life in this part of the world, but they can nevertheless be devastating for people impacted by them:  people may lose their entire rice crop if flood waters don’t recede in time; remote communities may lose access to the outside world as parts of their only road are washed away; and public health problems can multiply water and sanitation facilities are overwhelmed.

A large hydropower project like Nam Theun 2 (NT2) has a significant effect on water flows around the project, and so inevitably people begin to question whether NT2 is somehow making the local floods worse.  Questions around project’s role in exacerbating natural floods started even before Nam Theun 2 started operating (see a blog post on this back in 2009), and it has sporadically been blamed during this wet season as well.  A lot of these arguments stem from some pretty basic misunderstandings of how NT2 works, so although this information is already in the public domain, I thought I’d produce a simple summary here with reference to the attached map.

On the surface, the pace of life in the Pacific island country of Samoa is slow. Island time. That’s an impression that’s reinforced when touring the idyllic string of resorts and beach fales (small timber and thatch tourist cottages, often without walls and open to the tropical breeze) along the South East coast of Upolu, Samoa. You can watch the heat rise in a haze across the ridiculously tranquil blue waters and golden sands, as coconut palms wave, and tourists enjoy a weekend drink in the seafront restaurant of the locally-owned and recently rebuilt Tafua beach fales.