News and views on the coming collapse
Home » Posts tagged 'southeast asia'
DONG NAI, Vietnam: Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in a reservoir in southern Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, with locals and media reports suggesting a brutal heatwave and the lake’s management are to blame.
Like much of Southeast Asia – where schools have recently been forced to close early and electricity usage has surged – southern and central Vietnam have been scorched by devastating heat.
“All the fish in the Song May reservoir died for lack of water,” a local resident in Trang Bom district, who identified himself only as Nghia, told AFP.
“Our life has been turned upside down over the past 10 days because of the smell.”
Pictures show residents wading and boating through the 300ha Song May reservoir, with the water barely visible under a blanket of dead marine life.
According to media reports, the area has seen no rain for weeks and the water in the reservoir is too low for the creatures to survive.
Reservoir management had previously discharged water to try to save crops downstream, Nghia said.
“They then tried to renovate the reservoir, bringing in a pump to take the mud out so that the fish would have more space and water,” he said.
However, the efforts did not work and, shortly afterwards, many of the fish died, with local media reports suggesting as many as two hundred tonnes’ worth of fish may have perished.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Massive fires in Indonesia caused by the burning of forests and peatlands for agriculture have shrouded large areas of Southeast Asia in smoke this fall. But analysts say international anger over the fires could finally lead to a reduction in Indonesia’s runaway deforestation.
The fires that blazed in Indonesia’s rainforests in 1982 and 1983 came as a shock. The logging industry had embarked on a decades-long pillaging of the country’s woodlands, opening up the canopy and drying out the carbon-rich peat soils. Preceded by an unusually long El Niño-related dry season, the forest fires lasted for months, sending vast clouds of smoke across Southeast Asia.
Fifteen years later, in 1997 and 1998, a record El Niño year coincided with continued massive land-use changes in Indonesia, including the wholesale draining of peatlands to plant oil palm and wood pulp plantations. Large areas of Borneo and Sumatra burned, and again Southeast Asians choked on Indonesian smoke.
In the ensuing years, Indonesia’s peat and forest fires have become an annual summer occurrence. But this summer and fall, a huge number of conflagrations have broken out as a strong El Niño has led to dry conditions, and deforestation has continued to soar in Indonesia. Over the past several months, roughly 120,000 fires have burned, eliciting sharp protests from Singapore and other nations fed up with breathing the noxious haze from Indonesian blazes.
The pall of smoke still drifting over Southeast Asia is the most visible manifestation of decades of disastrous policies in Indonesia’s corrupt forestry and palm oil sectors.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
More rain forecast for flood-hit SE Asia – Asia-Pacific – Al Jazeera English.
People in South East Asia have been warned to prepare for more flooding, after days of heavy rain across the region that has killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands in Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Weather forecasters on Sunday warned that much of Malaysia will see more storms in the next three days; Thailand and Sri Lankan authorities also warned their people to brace for more floods.
“We expect another surge in heavy rain followed by strong winds brought by the seasonal northeast monsoon, which usually continues till March,” a Malaysian meteorological department official told AFP news agency.
According to officials, more than 200,000 people across the region have been left homeless because of the floods.
There are fears the death toll could rise as communities have been left stranded without food or medicine.
