Lakes News

JAMBI — A quintet of Jambi residents gathered one morning in May at the home of Leni Haini, an Indonesian environmental activist who last year received a prestigious award from…

One of Bangladesh’s two Ramsar sites, wetlands of international importance, is slowly losing some of the waterbirds that seek respite at this key migratory pit stop, a new study says.…

On April 4, a large fire gutted thousands of shops at a popular clothing market named Banga Bazar in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Firefighters complained of water scarcity as a…

KORK THLORK, Cambodia — Vorn Keo, perched on the edge of a green wooden boat, navigates through the flooded forest of Tonle Sap Lake and across the boundary into a…

LIMURU, Kenya — Kiambu County in Kenya is facing a major water scarcity crisis that is threatening not only people’s livelihoods but also biodiversity. Rivers and wetlands that were once…

KISUMU, Kenya — It is a little past 5 p.m. at the lakeside city of Kisumu, in the western part of Kenya. An hour later, the sun sets over the…

KISUMU, Kenya — At Dunga Beach on the shores of Lake Victoria, numerous varieties of fish, such as tilapia, Nile perch and mudfish, are processed for consumption and distribution. Every…

This story was produced with the funding support of the Pulitzer Center. WEST TURKANA, KENYA—By late morning along Kaito beach on the western banks of Lake Turkana, the heat beating…

DHAKA — As Bangladesh authorities prepare to declare the  country’s largest freshwater wetland a Ramsar site, its two other designated wetlands of international importance, including the Sundarbans, continue to come…

Venezuela sits on one of the largest deposits of proven crude oil and natural gas reserves in the world. For decades, it’s been the backbone, if not the lifeline, of…

DHAKA — Md. Dulal Mia, 50, ferries passengers in his small boat from one end of the Buriganga River to the other. He has been living along the river for…

DHAKA – Khalilur Rahman, 65, has been fishing in a tributary of the old Brahmaputra River in Kishoreganj for 50 years. Nowadays, he often returns home empty-handed. “The river has…

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic consumed humanity’s attention, our species ran through 4.5 trillion doses of myriad pharmaceuticals. In India alone, one drug, paracetamol — a pain reliever used to treat…

CHHNOK TRU, Cambodia — From her sun-bleached wooden houseboat in the floating village of Koh Tapov, on the southeastern side of the Tonle Sap lake in Kampong Thom province, Hai…

PREK TABAEK, Cambodia — The roots of the forests surrounding Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake spend half the year submerged in water. But in the past five years, they’ve been catching…

PREK TABAEK, Cambodia — Bat Savoeun claims he has Prime Minister Hun Sen’s signoff to farm his 2 hectares of land in Prek Tabaek village, on the edge of the…

BANYUMAS/JAKARTA, Indonesia — A muddy flood polluting a river on the Indonesian island of Java earlier this year depleted its fish stock, raising calls for restoration and restocking efforts in…

BLANTYRE, MALAWI — Despite ongoing protests from conservationists, the government of Malawi has rolled out construction works for a water project inside Lake Malawi National Park, the world’s first underwater…

Freshwater’s life-giving benefits are being gravely threatened by humanity’s manipulations of the hydrological cycle, impacting the climate and biodiversity, and undermining Earth’s operating system.

A hydroelectric dam complex in southern Argentina, one of the country’s largest energy projects, is facing backlash from conservationists and Indigenous communities who are worried about its impact on the…

It might be surprising to learn that, in a lake as large as Victoria, a single fish could shape so much of East Africa’s history, culture and, now, an uncertain…

Urban development projects surrounding a protected lake in Paraguay are threatening the recovery of local ecosystems and raising questions about the government’s ability to circumvent conservation mandates. Wetlands around Lake…

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe has withdrawn as a cooperating agency from the U.S Federal government’s ongoing environmental assessment of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) operations. Standing Rock attributed their…

DENPASAR/JAKARTA — The Indonesian government plans to have a network of dozens of villages with aquaculture farms by the end of the year, in a bid to spur the post-pandemic…

EL ESTOR, Guatemala — Germán Chub was still sleeping when police and military personnel showed up outside his home. It was the fourth day of a month-long state of siege,…

The recent arrests of staff of a Ugandan civil society organization, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), have been criticized as an attempt to stifle defenders of human rights…

JAKARTA — Years of deforestation and mining have devastated a wetland of international importance in Papua New Guinea, which, if left unchecked, could lead to the collapse of the ecosystem,…

It’s not unusual to see some rivers running black in Venezuela, or for fishermen to return home scraping dark sludge off their boots. Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of government…

Industrial agriculture feeds billions of people and created the modern world. But the nitrogen and phosphorus it’s fertilized with is putting the biosphere, and humanity, at risk.

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has unveiled the country’s first national priority plan to recover the ecosystems of 15 major lakes in “critical” condition by 2024. “Saving these national priority…