Story | 06 Dec, 2018
Geneva meeting deliberates on global convention to address plastic pollution
Member states, industry players, UN agencies, leading experts and civil society organisations from around the globe have come together this week in Geneva to discuss a potential new global convention to beat plastic pollution.
Blog | 27 Nov, 2018
Blog: Floating agriculture drifts from Bangladesh to Viet Nam
Floating agriculture is an age-old practice in Bangladesh. Haseeb Md. Irfanullah of IUCN Bangladesh writes on the recent introduction of this famous, traditional farming system to the Mekong Delta as an example of south-south cooperation.
Story | 05 Jul, 2018
How to increase the value of Vietnam’s forestry sector?
On a visit to Quang Tri in 2016 we asked a forest ranger where the best forest was. He said it was in remote areas too inaccessible for illegal logging or land conversion. If an area has fertile soil and is easy to access, people will turn it into farmland. When we asked a young farmer in Yen…
Story | 28 Jun, 2018
GEF Assembly beach clean-up yields nearly 1 kilo of trash per metre per minute
On Tuesday, 26 June, 300 volunteers trained by IUCN collected almost half a ton of trash – 82% of which was single-use plastics – in 30 minutes from a 500-metre stretch of beach in Da Nang, Viet Nam. The exercise coincided with the sixth Global Environment Facility (GEF) Assembly currently…
Story | 03 Apr, 2018
E-learning course on integrated land use planning launched in Tanzania
Under the leadership of the Environmental Law Centre, IUCN and UNITAR have jointly developed a new e-learning course on ‘Integrated planning for climate change and biodiversity’. The course was launched on 20 March 2018, in Mbeya, Tanzania, by Dr Anna Sabrina Wollmann of the UN Institute for…
Story | 05 Feb, 2018
60 year-old Sau Dung is a fisherman who lives by the Hau River, a tributary of the Mekong in Viet Nam’s Hau Giang Province. His family relies on his catch, and with his skill and hard work, he can earn VND 6 million (US$ 265) every month. But there are not many…
Story | 18 Jul, 2017
U.S.-ASEAN Conference on Marine Environmental Issues to be held in Bangkok, Thailand
The Stimson Center, on behalf of the U.S. State Department and in collaboration with IUCN and the Mangroves for the Future (MFF) Programme, is co-chairing the U.S.-ASEAN Conference on Marine Environmental Issues.
Story | 26 Jun, 2017
New tools to assess vulnerability of wetlands in the Mekong
From June 19 to 21, IUCN staff, partners, and local officials from the Xe Champhone and Beung Kiat Ngong Ramsar sites in Lao PDR gathered in Champhone District for a training on the use of a new series of tools to assess the vulnerability of the areas’ wetlands. The…
Story | 21 May, 2017
Banning vs. legalise and regulate in forest management
Two years ago, on a field survey in Bac Kan Province in Viet Nam, we heard about a farmer who needed 30 stamps to get a permit to harvest a single Styrax tonkinensis tree that was growing on his land. Even though the tree was on land that was designated as plantation forest and the farmer had a…
Story | 05 Apr, 2017
CEPF launches two new calls for proposals in Indo-Burma hotspot
The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) has launched a call for proposals for projects in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, Viet Nam and parts of Southern China. A separate call for proposals for projects in Myanmar has also been issued simultaneously.