Thailand News

Acting on a tipoff, Vietnamese police pried open a basement door in Nghe An province and flicked on the light switch. Videos from the August 2021 raid show officers filing…

After forests are logged, felled trees are typically sent to sawmills, where they’re processed into boards, or lumber. It’s in this processed form that wood typically enters the international commodity…

Since the 1950s, the rich tropical forests of the Greater Mekong region have been steadily depleted by the world’s growing appetite for timber. Did you know that if all the…

Did you know that illegal logging can be five times as lucrative as selling the world’s most well-known soda? In 2020, the Coca-Cola company reported $33 billion in revenue. The…

In August 2021, authorities at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport discovered a shipment of eight hornbills, caged but alive, en route to international markets. The Department of Wildlife and National…

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Once widespread across Southeast Asia, from Java to southern China, green peafowl (Pavo muticus) have vanished from much of the region over the past few decades,…

A new report shows that the world’s top fishing nations are using subsidies worth billions of dollars to exploit the high seas and the waters of other nations, including some…

Agroforestry is the most beneficial agricultural technique from a climate and biodiversity perspective: growing food, fuel, fiber, medicines and more under the cover of, or adjacent to, woody perennials like…

Southeast Asia is home to roughly half of the world’s tropical mountain forests. These highland ecosystems support massive carbon stores and tremendous biodiversity, including a host of species that occur…

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,…