Thailand News

Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting a wild cat that looks like a…

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — A plan to construct seven dams in one of mainland Southeast Asia’s last intact forest systems could cause widespread habitat loss and sever important wildlife corridors,…

SINGAPORE — Special economic zones set up to promote trade between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors are facilitating a black-market trade in wildlife products, according to watchdog group TRAFFIC.…

It might sound nihilistic and harsh to describe Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (Indochina) as forming a kind of buffer zone against the onslaught of snaring and the defaunation of forests…

MANILA — When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 in Southeast Asia, its governments took rapid containment actions: lockdowns, travel restrictions and trade suspensions, alerting the public about the virus. The…

The United Nations Basel Convention regulates international transport of hazardous waste, which in 2021 expanded to include plastics. But the U.S. has never fully implemented the agreement; Biden may change that.

In March 2020, a massive migration began when an international travel ban to curb COVID-19 brought Thailand’s tourism industry to a sudden halt. Elephant camps, which use more than 2,700…

On Sept. 3, 2019, the remains of Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, a Karen environmental and community rights defender who was disappeared in 2014, were found in an oil drum submerged under…

Big cats require big home ranges. In February 2016, a young male Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti) walked from Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand to Kayin state…

Srongpol Chantharueang remembers his parents telling him as a boy always to protect the local wetland forest when he grew up. They told him that the ecosystem would be important…

There have been more fires alerts around the world this year than last year, spelling dire consequences for health, biodiversity, and the economy — and human actions are mostly to…

Habitat loss and climate change are often blamed for the decreasing numbers of migratory shorebirds in a major flyway in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years. But it might be…

Conservationists set up two camera traps near a watering hole in a Thai forest — and then they waited. The first animal to step in front of the lens was…

In 2018, something extraordinary happened in Phuket, Thailand. For the first time in five years, a leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) crept onto a local beach, dug a nest in the…

The Bukit Tigapuluh landscape in Indonesia has been sliced and diced by roads, opening its forests to threats from the outside. As forest vanishes in the region, so too does…

In a Facebook photo, a truck with an open trailer is backed up against a mound of sand. The tailgate is down, and the gray shape of an elephant steps…

Camera traps in eastern Thailand’s Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai (DPKY) forest complex have yielded photos of tiger cubs, providing long-awaited evidence that the big cat is breeding in this part of…

Across the globe, tree cover loss hit record highs from 2016-2018, with roughly the size of a soccer field lost each second. In 2018 alone, the area of tree cover…

For the critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper, a tiny shorebird that makes an 8,000-kilometer (5,000-mile) migration each year, wetlands are vital stopover points. To boost the small bird’s population, the Rainforest…

One day in mid-2015, Dr. Nattapong Nithi-Uthai, who goes by the nickname “Arm,” looked at the pile of flip-flops in his backyard. Some 100,000 of them were stacked up waist…

Nopporn Nontapa had always wanted to take care of forests, but this dream was initially shattered when the Thai government rejected his application for a forestry job. Thirty years later,…

For two decades or more, alarms have been sounding for the Mekong Delta. It's being hammered by climate change, by a proliferation of upstream dams, by unsustainable and inappropriate farming…

Nineteen-year-old Pornchita Fahpratanprai had never participated in a climate strike before. High up in the mountains of Omkoi district in Chiang Mai, Thailand, far from Facebook and Instagram posts of…

This past summer, the world was gripped by the flames that tore through the Amazon rainforest and released huge volumes of trapped carbon dioxide in the process. Half a world…

In Asian society, where young people are expected to be submissive to elders, a vocal youth movement demanding climate justice from their governments is rising.

Since as far back as the early 1990s, Thailand has been the world’s largest exporter of natural rubber, responsible for as much as 35.1 percent of rubber exports in 2016.…

Traditional Asian medicine is driving the growing international trade in big cat products and leading to the mistreatment of thousands of animals, according to a recent report. Bones, blood, and…

IRRAWADDY DELTA, Myanmar — For many in Myanmar, Cyclone Nargis was a wake-up call. When it made landfall in May 2008, it devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, a rural and low-lying…

RANONG, Thailand — Beyond a metal gate in Ranong, a port town in southern Thailand, a warehouse is filled nearly wall to wall and floor to ceiling with bags of…

Seahorses continue to be traded in large volumes, despite many source countries imposing bans on exports of the animals, a new study has found. While some of these peculiarly shaped…