Dr. Trang Nguyễn — a wildlife conservation scientist with a PhD from Cambridge and the founder of WildAct — needs little introduction. She has been recognized as one of Forbes Asia’s 30 under 30, called a conservation “hero” by Sir David Attenborough on BBC’s Planet Earth III, and had her inspiring story, which includes going undercover to bring down illegal ivory poaching rings in Africa after surviving cancer, covered widely. But much of her work has been behind the scenes or at least in corners devoted to conservations. Her recent arrival on the social media scene, amongst memes, music videos, and TikTok challenges, represents a shift in approach.

The relationship between bees and elephants; an introduction to gibbons and pangolins; why migratory birds are at risk in Vietnam; what a forest patrol team member does on duty; the many ecosystems in a single Vietnamese national park; the daily tasks required to run WildAct; how a pair of conservationists juggle work and marriage; the horrors of shopping mall petting zoos and the impact chocolate can have on biodiversity: these are amongst the many topics populating Trang’s Instagram page. While viewers may end up binging a few dozen, the format and intent are clear after viewing just a few. Narrated by Trang, the upbeat, digestible videos introduce subjects related to Vietnam’s wildlife, conservation challenges, what WildAct does and why, Trang’s personal story and experiences, and some helpful advice for how viewers can act more responsibly.

“In the beginning, I was actually against doing Instagram videos,” Trang says of the steady stream content that began appearing on her personal page several months ago. Noting in an email with Saigoneer that she doesn’t consider herself a media person and does not enjoy making the videos, she explained that it’s all for the greater good. The videos, her team convinced her, “could become a powerful way to bring conservation stories from Vietnam to the public, especially stories that people rarely hear — about rangers, local communities, wildlife trade, or difficult social issues connected to conservation.”

“Different people connect through different mediums. Some people are touched by books, some by films, some by documentaries, some by social media… At the end of the day, I think storytelling is one of the most important parts of conservation. Because people only protect what they care about,” she explained. While it took some convincing from Hoàng Nguyễn, WildAct’s communications and fundraising advisor, Trang eventually acquiesced to lending her image, voice and fame to share stories that endevor to inspire people into caring.

The aims of the videos are straightforward. First and foremost, Trang wants to make knowledge accessible as part of holistic efforts to foster the love and respect for the natural world required for conservation. Hopefully, the videos will also result in donations that support WildAct’s many efforts which include patrolling forests, research that leads to evidence-based conservation, local and ethnic minority empowerment, women leadership training and empowerment, and broad education initiatives.

Hoàng, the leading charge behind the project, explained the decision to make the videos and the process for recording. He recognized that personal channels are more effective in reaching audiences and decided they should be in English, as opposed to the bilingual posts on WildAct’s Facebook, to reach a wide audience that includes educated Vietnamese. He set an ambitious goal of at least 15 new videos per month, but the WildAct team’s expertise and wealth of material developed for other platforms make this more achievable than it might sound. They write the scripts based on what they’ve published elsewhere or what Trang and the team have discussed in regular meetings. Trang always approves the scripts before shooting, which can take a bit of convincing when they involve her personal life. 

While videos touching on Trang’s private affairs, such as one introducing her husband, a conservationist who works with sunbears, attract huge audiences, it is another, more difficult topic that Trang is most proud of. “One of the strongest reactions I received was after we released a video on gender-based violence in the wildlife conservation sector. A lot of people reached out to me privately — through Instagram, emails — sharing their own personal experiences, thanking me for speaking out, and asking me not to stop talking about these issues,” Trang said.

“At the same time, when the video spread more widely in Vietnamese media, there was also a huge amount of backlash and trolling. People reacted very aggressively. But what stayed with me most were the quieter messages from Vietnamese women and conservationists saying: I cannot speak publicly because I’m afraid of the reaction, but I experienced this too. And many told me: ‘Please don’t become silent.’”

Trang’s determination to remain loud not only puts her at risk of public criticism but also leaves her with less time to do what she is truly passionate about. “My perfect working day would honestly be going back 15 years ago — spending months in the forest, following wild animals and observing their behaviour. That was the reason I first fell in love with conservation. It is where my passion is, where my expertise is, and honestly, where I feel happiest. But as you become a manager, a director, or a founder, you slowly lose that privilege. Your days become meetings, fundraising, donor calls, budgets, paperwork, management… and a lot of things you may not even enjoy,” she summarized. 

While Trang is upbeat and the team diligent, conservation is hardly a realm of unbridled optimism. Challenges abound. As the nation prioritizes economic growth and societies around the world gravitate to transitory joys that replace human thought with vapid impulses, nature suffers. Hoàng noted that he has the most hope for younger generations who are more open to discussions of sustainability and viewing wildlife as having intrinsic value beyond its use by humans. Once they are in positions of power, they can implement the institutional stewardship necessary to make meaningful change that isn’t beholden to bottom-line economics. 

In the meantime, WildAct does what it can while recognizing that energy and attention are expensive, and not all issues are equally surmountable. The rise of shopping mall petting zoos, a key WildAct focus, illustrates how and why they select certain topics. “As a wildlife conservationist, I want to say this clearly: this is a horrible idea, for both animals and children,” Trang says of them in a recent video. The terrors of these set-ups are easy to explain and, when supported by heartbreaking imagery, allow the problem to resonate emotionally. Meanwhile, solutions are accessible and achievable: simply choose not to visit and instead support activities that involve animals in their natural habitats so children can learn about actual behaviors and develop an understanding that animals are not sources of amusement for people, but sensitive living creatures of intrinsic value. 

WildAct’s work regarding shopping mall petting zoos can have a significant impact on public perspective and thus impart important change. But small victories such as turning people off these zoos, are not enough. In societies where it's acceptable to lust after US$9,000 a night hotel resorts while organizations struggle to raise the monthly US$300 salary for park rangers who patrol forests protecting endangered species, it’s easy to lose hope.

Trang understood, as she shared with Saigoneer: “I think nowadays it is very easy to feel overwhelmed, disappointed, or even hopeless about the state of the planet. But I think hope is very important. And in order to have hope, you need to act. The good thing is that conservation does not only happen in forests or laboratories. Small daily actions still matter — reducing single-use plastic, consuming less, supporting ethical businesses, changing diets, speaking up for nature, or simply paying more attention to where products come from. Real change happens when people act out of love, empathy, and hope.”

This idea of change occurring from love and hope brings us back to Trang’s realization that “people only protect what they care about.” If we want to save our precious plants, animals, and ecosystems, we must help others know and thus care about them. Share Trang’s social media videos and Saigoneer’s Natural Selection pieces with friends, family and co-workers so they can hopefully develop a deeper respect and appreciation for our wondrous natural world. Maybe you will hear Trang’s voice the next time you are thinking of buying new clothing rather than refashioning something you already own. Maybe you will opt to dine in a restaurant instead of ordering delivery. Perhaps you will hear the haunting cry of a gibbon the next time you are planning a trip and, instead of a luxury room, you settle for something more humble and donate the difference to the operations tirelessly working to ensure we still have a world worth admiring. 

Photos courtesy of WildAct.

As the Iran war crunches global energy supplies and disrupts prices, Southeast Asian leaders may need to diversify oil and gas supplies in order to protect ordinary people.

However, they must also look beyond short-term remedies and seek to get their countries off the fossil fuel rollercoaster. As well as building out renewable energy generation and modernising the grid so it can handle the new power, the region should be more prudent about importing gas and turbocharge electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Road transport is a key driver of oil demand in the region, and gas is a core part of several countries’ power supply. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is disrupting roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows. Of the gas exported through the strait last year, 90% was destined for Asia.

Southeast Asia has been a net importer of oil for over two decades. With its population growing, the region’s meeting of its demand continues to rely on a 1990s model: more car and fuel subsidies; more imported cooking fuels; and a continued push to build even more gas power capacity. Yet its oil and gas production has been decreasing.

Indonesia’s oil production peaked in the 1990s, and it now imports 60% of its needs while spending tens of billions of dollars annually on fuel and electricity subsidies to keep prices stable for households. Thailand’s gas production has been declining since the mid-2010s, yet it still generates about 65% of its power from the fuel; and, in 2023, it imported nearly half of its gas supply, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Though the region as a whole has been pushing to produce more gas, largely via drilling, the implication is clear: however quickly countries try to ramp up production, demand on its current trajectory will continue to far outpace supply growth. Southeast Asia is on track to become a net gas importer.

To secure its energy future, the region needs to accelerate the electrification of its transport sector via EV adoption and strengthen its clean energy development, opening a credible path towards energy self-sufficiency.

The impact of EV adoption

People often dismiss the benefits of EV adoption when fossil fuels’ share in the energy mix is still high. But there is another pathway: electrify and open up possibilities of powering the sector through green energy. Even when powered by a fossil-fuel-heavy grid, EVs produce less emissions over the vehicle’s lifetime than conventional cars by avoiding tailpipe emissions once on the road, eventually reaching a “breakeven” point, as research by BloombergNEF has shown.

More importantly, increased EV adoption enables the region to decouple from fossil fuels as the grid cleans up, while gasoline and diesel vehicles offer no comparable exit path. Clean electricity creates a route to both lower emissions and greater energy self-sufficiency.

In 2025, 2.3 million barrels of daily oil use were avoided through the global EV fleet, BloombergNEF estimates. This represents a mere 2% of global oil demand, but is a clear signal of an alternative path.

China chose the EV route partly to reduce its reliance on oil imports, which account for around 70% of its needs. That strategy is estimated to have yielded results amid the Gulf energy crisis. For Southeast Asian countries to do the same, its governments need to increase public and political support for greater EV adoption. They should do this by working with electric automakers to boost EV manufacturing and create local jobs, as well as by establishing charging infrastructure.

Gas as a stable transition fuel?

With Asian LNG prices remaining highly volatile amid the global energy crisis, the narrative of gas as a stable transition fuel is beginning to unravel. The crisis has exposed the risks of rapidly expanding gas’s share in Southeast Asia’s power mix.

Gas has been widely promoted as a stopgap measure to achieve the region’s aims of reducing its coal dependence and CO₂ emissions while it grows its renewable power. Research by the Energy Shift Institute, where I work, shows that many Asian governments count gas as part of sustainable investments. But though gas combustion does result in less emission than coal, when leakage occurs in its value chain it is 80 times more potent as a climate heater than CO₂.

There is also the premium on imported LNG from distant suppliers, which is significantly more expensive than domestically produced piped gas.

Gas is far harder than oil to stockpile, making it riskier for import-dependent economies. This vulnerability was evident during the 2022 energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, when LNG prices surged and cargoes originally bound for Pakistan were diverted to Europe as traders sought to capitalise on higher prices. Similar episodes are likely to recur in future supply shocks.

There will be a place to develop some local resources and stockpiles. As with oil, gas will continue to have a role to play as an energy and industrial material input, particularly in industries with limited alternative technologies, such as fertiliser.

China can again be looked to as an example, with an 8% gas share in its total energy supply in 2023, nearly 40% of which was imported. This, combined with its rapid renewables growth, reveals a clear underlying logic: limit exposure to imported energy while reserving gas for purposes that critically need it.

Continuing to rely on gas imports threatens to lock Southeast Asia into the same vulnerability it is only beginning to reckon with on the oil front.

Its governments and utilities routinely cite high upfront costs as a barrier to building renewables and modernising grids, yet sign long-term LNG import contracts without similar scrutiny. They are also burning through cash during the Gulf crisis: Malaysia’s bill for subsidies to stabilise retail fuel prices for consumers has shot up by over ten times. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s fuel subsidies to keep prices affordable for households and motorists are estimated to cost the state IDR6.7 trillion (US$387 million) per US dollar increase in the price of oil. This raises the urgent question of how budgets can best be deployed to secure energy supply for the region.

Short-term fixes during crises are crucial, but true leadership in establishing a secure energy supply requires long-term visionary goals. Competing government budgetary priorities and the need to secure immediate energy supplies understandably pull attention toward familiar remedies such as diversifying oil and gas suppliers and creating more emergency stockpiles.

But in energy, there are no quick fixes; the key is in pursuing a steady direction. Southeast Asia has yet to fully explore exit routes that can reduce its exposure to oil and gas supply shocks. The 1970s oil crisis sparked the emergence of renewables, and the current crisis may prove equally defining for the world’s energy systems.

Clean energy deployment must be accelerated. The transition will take time, but the starting point is clear: governments need to electrify as much as possible before the next crisis peeks its head around the corner.

Top photo: Electric cars at a charging station in Bali, Indonesia. Photo by Carrot via Alamy.

Putra Adhiguna is the managing director of Energy Shift Institute, an Asia-focused energy finance thinktank.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth and was republished with permission. Read the original article on Dialogue Earth here. 

Nước mắm — that ruby-hued elixir; that salty, fish-flesh-sweet open secret in your favorite recipe; that indispensable icon of Vietnamese culture and, by extension, identity — owes itself to Commerson’s anchovies. That’s right, if your fish sauce comes from the central region, where it was first developed, the fish pressed with salt to produce it are Stolephorus commersonnii, a species named in 1801 after Philibert Commerson, a white Frenchman. Picture all the hardscrabble village homes suffering under the yoke of colonialism, where one of the day’s few pleasures was a humble meal made delicious by a carefully rationed dash of fish sauce and an ingredient whose name pays homage to their colonizers. 

Left: Philibert Commerson. Photo via wikimedia.
Right: Stolephorus commersonnii. Photo via Arobid.

Sadly, naming endemic creatures after foreigners is a convention not unique to Commerson’s anchovies. Scanning lists of animals native to Vietnam yields a great number of western men (it’s always men). Delacour's Langur (Trachypithecus delacouri), Lichtenfelder's gecko (Goniurosaurus lichtenfelderi), Osgood's rat (Rattus osgoodi), and Griffin's leaf-nosed bat (Hipposideros griffini) are all Vietnamese animals, as much as an animal can be claimed by a nation, with names honoring non-Vietnamese. 

Left: Delacour's langur. Photo via Orangepopp.
Right: Lichtenfelder's gecko. Photo via Biolib.

Binomial nomenclature, the globally accepted standard for naming organisms, includes a first, “generic” name that identifies the genus and a second, specific name that distinguishes the species within that genus. Unlike common names, which differ across languages (i.e. tiger or cọp are the common names for Panthera tigris), scientific names allow for a precise, relatively simple means of discussing organisms across regions and disciplines. This is particularly important when it comes to plants and animals that may have medicinal qualities or be poisonous. The system, developed by 17^th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus during his ill-fated attempts to identify every living creature on Earth, is currently governed by various internationally agreed-upon codes of rules, including the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). 

Binomial, also called scientific names, and their conventions are as messy as one might expect from scientists working before the advent of electricity, gas engines, refrigerators, typewriters or telephones. The second halves of the names often reference physical characteristics, geographical locations, or behaviors to aid in accurately identifying an organism. But sometimes they are simply used as a means of paying respect to individuals. While the science community frowns aggressively on naming any animal or plant after oneself, specific names, since their advent, have been a way to compliment a mentor, peer, friend or loved one. More than one scientist have used them in attempts to woo a woman or land a promotion. 

Left: Beyonce's horsefly. Photo via NBC News.
Right: Darth Vadar's isopod. Photo via Pensoft.

In addition to all the names of scientists that appear in the records, there are more playful examples that involve puns and pop culture, such as the Darth Vader isopod (Bathynomus vaderi); a genus of crustaceans named Godzillius; a large-eyed, swamp-dwelling fish named after a Lord of the Rings character (Galaxias gollumoide); and even a horsefly with a golden bum named after Beyoncé (Scaptia beyonceae). Considering the vast number of beetles, worms, fungus and microscopic sea creatures in the world, not just now, but across all time in the fossil record, it’s easy to understand how Diego Maradona has a damselfly (Librelula maradoniana) and Lady Gaga has a wasp (Aleiodes gaga). 

Sanqiaspis vietnamensis, an ancient, jawless fish that lived over 400 million years ago, was formally described in 2009. Illustration by Stanton Fink.

Let’s return to Vietnam. Because of many reasons including the western origins of the naming conventions, global inequalities that have historically placed western science at the forefront of discoveries, and accepted racism, references to Vietnam are relatively rare in the records, despite the thousands of opportunities. Certain geographical references do appear, including countless annamensis, tonkinensis, and cochinchinensis. More recent examples include Rhacophorus hoanglienensis, a frog found within the Hoàng Liên National Park; a gecko (Gekko badenii) whose name references the Bà Đen mountain where it lives; an ancient, jawless fish (Sanqiaspis vietnamensis); and even our beloved sao la (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), as noted by researcher Khôi Nguyễn.

Scientists are more likely to name new species after Vietnamese locations, as opposed to individuals, but a few do reference the immense impact of Vietnamese researchers, including Dr. Ngô Văn Bὶnh and Dr. Nguyễn Văn Sáng, who were honored with snakes (Dendrelaphis binhi and Coluberoelaps nguyenvansangi, respectively). Historical figures make appearances as well, including a moth (Marcopoloia leloi) named after Lê Lợi; a beetle (Cyphochilus leducthoi) after Lê Đức Thọ; and an ant (Xymmer phungi) for Phan Đình Phùng. Hồ Chí Minh, meanwhile, received the privilege of having both a spider (Pholcus hochiminhi) and a beetle (Oedichirus hochimini). 

Commonly called Bình's bronzeback snake in honor of Dr. Ngô Văn Bὶnh, Dendrelaphis binhi is a rather charismatic critter. Photo via iNaturalist.

I think the names could be doing even more, however, and experts agree. A recent paper from the Royal Society concluded that: “Because the nomenclatural Codes impose surprisingly few constraints on the formation of a new scientific name, naming is one of the most creative acts in all the sciences. The results of unleashing scientists’ creativity have been fascinating, with species bearing scientific names coming from many source languages and with a remarkable variety of etymologies. Scientific names (like the scientists who confer them) can be beautiful, irritating, amusing, poignant, provocative or infuriating. They raise important issues of social justice and equity in the history and practice of science. Finally, they can apparently have a role in directing our scientific attention to study.” If scientific names can make people excited about the natural world, aware of important issues, interested in local history, or proud of their heritage, we should embrace creative naming with great enthusiasm. 

A few recent namings give me hope that things are headed in the right direction. A Central Highlands hedgehog was given the name Hylomys macarong, because its front teeth resemble the fangs of a vampire (ma cà rồng), and any use of non-western languages helps decolonialize science and invite young people here to envision a place for themselves within it. Meanwhile, a dainty bird, the Actinodura sodangorum, honors the Södang (or Xơ Đăng) ethnic minority group that lives in the forest where it was found, and promotes Vietnam's multi-ethnicity. 

Left: The so-called vampire hedgehog. Photo via Discover Wildlife.
Right: Actinodura sodangorum, commonly called the black-crowned barwing in English. Photo via Wikimedia.

But where is the whimsy? Where is the child-like joy and silliness that accompanies rigorous thought and logic to uphold humanity? It is here: Banhxeochelys trani. Named in 2019, Banhxeochelys describes an extinct genus of turtle that lived in Vietnam 39 to 34 million years ago. Thin, flat, and cracked, the fossilized shells found in the Na Dương coal mine in Lạng Sơn reminded the Vietnamese scientists of bánh xèo, and thus, the entire new genus was named Banhxeochelys (the Greek word chelys means "turtle"). The first, and so far only species within the genus was given the specific name trani to honor Đặng Ngọc Trần, a retired director of the Department of Geology and Minerals, who helped the nation make great strides in geological research.

The shells of Banhxeochelys trani as described in the 2019 scientific paper. Photo via Wikimedia.

An interpretation of what Banhxeochelys trani would have looked like alive. Artwork by Alain Beneteau via Facebook.

A prehistoric turtle named after a delicious Vietnamese meal: could such a whimsical name attract attention to Vietnam’s important and vulnerable biodiversity? Could it inspire hesitant young Vietnamese to dream about their rightful place in global scientific discourse? Does it at least make you chuckle and want to go out for bánh xèo? If even one of these is true, I hope you’ll join me in my desire to see many more such names in the near future. With hundreds of new species identified every year in Vietnam, there are plenty of opportunities.

Have you ever walked past a plant and wondered "Hey, I wonder what that could do?"

Such curiosity is what ultimately led Henry Herbert to spend two years writing the new book, Wild Medicinal Plants of Central Vietnam. Herbert, who lives in Huế, took a fairly circuitous route to get to this point. "After graduating in the United Kingdom, I went to work as a web developer in London," he tells Saigoneer in a call. This was six years ago, and he quickly discovered that he was deeply unhappy: "I just felt completely devoid of meaning in my life, utterly down, depressed actually. It was a really difficult time in my life." 

Eventually he quit, sold most of his belongings, and decamped from London in order to volunteer at farms, initially in South Africa, and then in Columbia. "I immersed myself in that and through working alongside people who are much more knowledgeable than me, learned about plant life and farming," Herbert says. "I'd top that up with courses and intensive reading, but most of it came through experience."

After spending the early part of the pandemic in Columbia, Herbert moved to Hanoi, where he struggled with the stress of a major city for a year before relocating with his wife, Linh, to Huế. "It's a beautiful place," he says. "The nature is majestic and lovely, and there's lots of space to walk around. It was much, much more suitable."

Herbert walking in a forest outside of Huế.

The duo then began volunteering at a series of local organizations including the Lotus Education Farm, and at the same time Herbert launched a Facebook page called Đom Đóm Permaculture in order to share information about the region's native flora. This is where the seeds of the book took root.

"The whole book thing started then because I'd started to learn more and more about wild plants just through working with people," Herbert recalls. "I also have a dog and I'd often take him on walks in the forest, and I'd meet local people harvesting various plants in the forest or in the fields."

Herbert, who, in his words, speaks "decent, not perfect" Vietnamese, would stop and ask people what they were collecting and what they used it for. "My curiosity was to just know more and ask more questions and do my own research," he said. "It took about two years of asking a lot of people, a lot of research, a lot of trying things myself, because I wanted to back up what people were saying with what has been scientifically proven." 

The result is a book featuring 203 different species of flora found in the wild around Huế, broken down into annual herbs and grasses; perennial herbs, succulents and cacti; shrubs; vines and climbing plants; trees; and ferns and aquatic plants. Accompanied by color photos, each species includes the local name, any other Vietnamese name and, if available, the English name, as well as details on how to identify the plant, which areas and when to find it, and the traditional medicinal uses it has. There are also chapters on how to respectfully harvest plants in order to avoid taking too much, and how to clean and ultimately prepare a plant for medicinal use. 

Herbert gathering medicinal plants.

As Herbert dove deeper into his book research, he realized that most of the knowledge related to these plants and how they can be used had a single repository: members of elder generations. "Traditionally, it would pass down from generation to generation; that's how the knowledge got there in the first place," he said. "But increasingly, that's being ignored. Young people would rather go to the city and earn money or watch TV and not listen to grandma's knowledge." 

Herbert had first-hand experience with this, as his grandmother in the UK was a keen botanist: "She loved to teach me about certain plants, and mostly I just remember not really listening and not really caring, and that's increasingly happening. It would be an absolute shame if this knowledge is lost." 

While he hopes the book can be a humble contribution to the storage of this expertise, Herbert was also routinely astonished by just how accurate the wisdom the people he spoke to was.

"I'd ask someone what they're using a plant for, and they'd tell me, 'I'm picking this one and using it to wash my skin because of scabies or some kind of infection,' and on multiple occasions I would go back and look the plant up online," he explains. "And eventually I'd be able to track down the scientific name and do a whole host of reading in English and find scientific studies, and it's always exactly what they said it is."

"It's amazing," he goes on, "what they say they're using it for is exactly what it's for, whether anti-inflammatory properties or good for bathing sores on the skin or ringworm. That just absolutely blew my mind, the fact that these people have never read any scientific paper or book, it's just known." 

Ultimately, Herbert hopes that Wild Medicinal Plants of Central Vietnam can, if nothing else, remind us of the importance of respecting those who came before us. 

"I think we often kind of turn our nose up at what we might think of as homeopathy stuff," he says. "There can be stuff that doesn't work, of course, and there can be ineffective treatments, but there's a reason why this has been passed down for generations for so long."

Photos courtesy of Henry Herbert.

This article was originally published in 2022.

You can order a copy of Wild Medicinal Plants of Central Vietnam through the Đom Đóm Permaculture page. A portion of the proceeds will go towards Tịnh Trúc Gia, a community for young adults living with disabilities in Huế.

In August 2025, Malaysian campaigner Wong Pui Yi stood outside the UN headquarters in Geneva and made an appeal to Global North nations: “Stop treating the Global South as the rubbish bin for plastic waste you cannot handle.”

During that meeting, representatives from 184 countries failed to reach an agreement on a treaty to end plastic pollution. But the need for one has not gone away, particularly for Southeast Asian nations.

The region became the top destination for plastic waste imports following a solid waste import ban by China in 2017. Imports remain at a higher level in some of the region’s countries, according to data from UN Trade and Development. Data from the OECD, a group of mostly high-income countries, found that Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam remained the top non-OECD export destinations for waste from OECD countries in 2023.

Plastic waste washed up on a beach in Sarawak, Malaysia. The country and some of its regional neighbors have implemented bans on plastic waste imports, but experts fear this will lead to a reshuffling of waste to countries with weaker restrictions, perpetuating the cycle of “waste colonialism.” Photo via RDW Environmental/Alamy.

Some Southeast Asian countries have implemented bans on plastic waste imports. But experts fear this will only lead to a reshuffling of waste to other countries with weaker restrictions, perpetuating the cycle of what critics call “waste colonialism.”

This term, first recorded in 1989, suggests that the trade enables the high-consumption lifestyles of the Global North, with countries in the Global South left to deal with the consequences.

Exporting health and environmental harms

The global waste trade emerged in the 1980s as a means for countries with high recycling costs to send waste to countries where recycling could be done at lower cost. In countries like China, imported waste also filled a gap of raw materials to produce plastics, metals and papers.

Looser environmental regulations in importing countries made the plastics trade commercially viable. “They export the pollution to Southeast Asian countries, since we have less regulation and less control because of our historical context,” explains Punyathorn Jeungsmarn, a plastics campaigner and researcher at the Environmental Justice Foundation.

In theory, the trade is meant to create jobs while developing new revenue streams and recycling infrastructure. In practice, however, it has overwhelmed waste management systems in many importing countries.

Thitikorn Boontongmai is a program manager and researcher at Ecological Alert and Recovery Thailand (EARTH). The NGO inspected several “illegal recycling factories” in eastern Thailand and observed waste simply dumped in landfills rather than processed.

With heavy rainfall, much of this plastic ends up in the oceans by way of the region’s long rivers and coastlines: six of the ten highest plastic polluting countries are in Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, the availability of cheap imported plastics has led to lower demand for recyclables. This lowers prices for the waste pickers who collect and trade these materials, Punyathorn explains. He notes that pickers have threatened to stop collecting waste unless the government bans the import of plastics. “If they stop collecting, then the waste in the ground and on the streets is not collected, and you have a situation where the entire domestic supply chain is disrupted.”

An informal waste collector waits to be paid for a delivery of recyclable materials outside a recycling center in Bangkok. The compressed plastic bottles were collected by workers like him, and will be sold on in bulk to make new bottles. Photo by Luke Duggleby/Dialogue Earth.

The plastics trade has also affected human health. An investigation by Greenpeace Malaysia around a dumpsite in Pulau Indah found hazardous chemicals and heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. The report noted that these contaminants may cause health issues including cardiovascular, respiratory and cognitive diseases. Between 2018 and 2019, when plastic burning spiked in Sungai Petani, Kedah, community advocates reported a 30% increase in cases of respiratory diseases.

Southeast Asia pushes back

In response to their environmental impacts, several Southeast Asian countries have rolled out restrictions and bans on waste imports. In January 2025, the Thai and Indonesian governments announced the immediate halting of plastic scrap imports.

Fearing the arrival of waste diverted from those countries, Malaysia restricted the inflow of plastic waste. In July 2025, it banned shipments from countries not party to the Basel Convention on the waste trade. A further ban in February 2026 forbade the import of e-waste, introduced shortly after a six-month blanket moratorium on all types of waste import was proposed.

Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, says complete bans work because “shipping companies will avoid carrying any kind of waste to your country. This is what China did”. But some activists and experts note that bans have not always stopped imports. Thitikorn says EARTH had seen cases of imported plastic waste being declared as something else in Thailand. Campaigners in Indonesia have also documented paper scrap imports being contaminated with plastic, with up to 30% of the import being plastic. These have been sold to brokers or burned as fuel.

“At the end of the day, when it comes to a local level,” Punyathorn says, authorities with power to regulate or permit certain things coming in “may have vested interests that allow them to just… circumvent these [bans]”.

Lukas Fort, who researches Indonesia’s environmental governance at the University of Copenhagen, tells Dialogue Earth that the recycling industry’s dependence on imported plastics “raises the possibility that imports may continue in some form if enforcement is uneven.” He says this is especially so due to the often competing interests of government bodies, for instance the environment ministry and the trade or industry ministry.

Even if bans are effectively implemented, campaigners raised concerns that they would just change where plastic waste ends up. “Every year it’s a new destination,” says Kaustubh Thapa, a post-doctorate researcher at Radboud University’s Faculty of Environmental Science. “Waste traders always will find [new] destinations to exploit.”

An example of this can be seen in 2023, as plastic waste import restrictions were tightening in countries like Thailand. An investigation into customs data during this period revealed that much misreported waste from Europe and North America had been illegally dumped in war-torn Myanmar, transiting through Thailand.

Though Punyathorn thinks the effectiveness of restrictions are limited, he is hopeful about other measures being considered. In Thailand, these include the Sustainable Packaging Act, in which producers will be responsible for post-consumption management of waste, such as recovery and recycling. This act, along with proposed policies on circular economy and a pollution register, show that there is a “growing momentum towards trying to use domestic waste rather than imports,” he notes.

The global plastics treaty

As Southeast Asia deals with the continued influx of imported plastic waste, a global plastics treaty still hangs in the balance. The most recent round of negotiations in Geneva in August 2025 ended with a weakened draft text. Chief among the challenges faced were efforts by oil-producing states to block measures to curb plastic production and regulate chemical additives to plastic.

Even nations pushing for an ambitious treaty have avoided confronting the waste trade directly, Gündoğdu notes, referring to member states of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (HAC). “How can a high-ambition group not be ‘high-ambitious’ about strict control of plastic waste trade to [countries in] Africa and other countries?” he says, noting that European HAC members are some of the largest plastic exporters to developing countries. Similarly, some Southeast Asian states have had to balance their petrochemical industry ambitions with resolving the negative impacts of imported waste.

“The last negotiation left off on a very uncertain note,” says Punyathorn, highlighting the resignation of former treaty chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso after nations were unable to agree on two drafts he proposed. Since we spoke to Punyathorn, a new chair was elected, revitalizing hopes of momentum towards an effective treaty.

An art installation of a tap spewing plastic sourced from a slum in Nairobi, displayed at the UN Environment Assembly 5.2 that took place in the city in 2022. The most recent round of negotiations in Geneva in August 2025 ended with a weakened draft text. Photo by Ahmed Nayim Yussuf / UNEP, CC BY-NC-SA.

Existing international legislation could provide a guideline for what an effective plastics treaty could look like. In 2019, the Basel Convention was amended to strengthen control of the trans-boundary movement of plastic waste, notably requiring prior informed consent before such waste crosses borders.

However, being voluntary, the convention is insufficient, says Gündoğdu. A treaty should address the waste trade in a manner aligned with the convention, while consolidating the existing codes for hazardous, non-hazardous and plastics under a single definition of plastic waste to make it more difficult to exploit loopholes, he notes.

One of the key dividing lines in the negotiations — for which next official rounds are anticipated at end-2026 or early 2027 — is whether the treaty will include a cap on plastic production, which is where the harms of the waste trade begin, Punyathorn says.

He explains that countries with more natural gas and oil than needed for energy production will use it to produce plastics, particularly disposable single-use items such as bags, spoons and straws, in order to flush out a high supply as quickly as possible. Once disposed of, these low-quality plastics are harder to collect, recycle and manage, and so are often exported to poorer countries.

He says the best way to stop this is to turn off the fossil fuel tap causing this overflow, “make plastics more expensive, and then you would only have necessary products that can be properly managed throughout the value chain.”

Top image: An officer from Malaysia’s environment ministry examines a container of non-recyclable plastic which was held by authorities at a port in Klang. The country restricted the inflow of plastic waste in July 2025, months after Thailand and Indonesia announced the halting of plastic scrap imports. Photo by Vincent Thian / Associated Press / Alamy.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth and was republished with permission. Visit the Dialogue Earth website for more.

With hues of orange and black on its wings and a furry, fluffy face, the painted woolly bat is a stunner. But its beauty has become a deadly liability. People want to hang the bats — dead and stuffed — on their walls, display them as collectibles and even set them in jewelry.

In recent years, taxidermied and framed bats have become popular as Halloween décor and, oddly, as Christmas tree decorations, sold to customers in the US, as well as Europe and Canada. This macabre trade first came to light in 2015 when scientists found dead bats, including painted woolly bats, for sale in Vietnam’s largest metropolis, Hồ Chí Minh City. Then, nearly a decade later, scientists realized that it wasn’t just a few stores selling bats: There’s also a huge online market.

In 2024, researchers from the Bat Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, documented nearly 800 bats for sale on Amazon.com, eBay and Etsy over a three-month period. Their “Dying for décor” study, published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research, suggests that the trade is global. A quarter of the bats sold online were from a single species: painted woolly bats, or dơi mũi nhẵn đốm vàng in Vietnamese (Kerivoula picta).

After a successful awareness campaign by conservation organizations, eBay and Etsy banned the sale of bat products on their sites in 2025.

Painted woolly bats are nocturnal and sparsely distributed in the landscape, roosting in small groups. Image by faridmuzaki via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Now, a new study finds that this ornamental trade continues to thrive in Vietnam. Two surveys conducted in 2024 in HCMC’s tourist markets found more than 50 taxidermied and framed painted woolly bats in souvenir shops, sold alongside other wildlife products.

Painted woolly bats, also known as butterfly bats, “are one of the most beautiful bats there is,” said study author Chris Shepherd, a senior conservation advocate at US-based nonprofit the Center for Biological Diversity. Native to 11 countries in South and Southeast Asia, they’re classified as near threatened, and populations are declining. A 2020 survey found that their numbers had dropped by 25% over the last 15 years, largely because of this trade.

While it’s illegal to hunt them in each of their range countries, commercial cross-border trade isn’t regulated or monitored, as they’re not protected under CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty.

The US is the biggest importer of these colorful bats and other related species, with more than 1,000 dead individuals entering the country yearly. So in 2024, Shepherd and his colleagues petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the painted woolly bat under the Endangered Species Act, which would prohibit its import, export, transport, trade and possession within the US In August 2025, the agency announced it was initiating a review of the species status based on the petition.

A taxidermied and framed painted woolly bat for sale in a shop in HCMC beside insects, documented as part of research quantifying the scope of the trade in bats. Image by Joanna Coleman.

Thriving trade in Vietnam

In mid-2024, one of the study authors visited HCMC markets to gauge the scale of the trade in the city and the prices that ornamental bats commanded. During an eight-day survey, they visited 85 shops in three different districts: 66 sold souvenirs and 19 others offered traditional medicine. They found 41 painted woolly bats in 13 shops at Bến Thành Market in the city center, dried and mounted in black shadowbox frames. Shops at other markets had none on display. The framed bats sold for anywhere between VND250,000 and 890,000 (about US$10–35) apiece.

The researcher returned to the same market a few months later, in November 2024, and found 18 bat ornaments for sale; six were painted woolly bats, including a pup. “They are mainly marketed to tourists, so this likely amounts to international trade,” said the study’s co-author, Joanna Coleman, a biology professor at the City University of New York in the US and a member of the IUCN Bat Specialist Group.

Since painted woolly bats were extremely popular in HCMC markets — representing a third of all bats sold — she said the demand “must be higher for them than for other bats” because of their striking beauty.

The researchers couldn’t definitively identify the other species for sale, but based on the labels attached, they seemed to belong to the genus, Pipistrellus, a widely distributed group of bats found in Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. These shops also sold butterflies, beetles, scorpions, moths, lizards, spiders and double-winged true bugs — all dried and framed, just like the bats.

When asked about the origins of the bats they sold, vendors told researchers that painted woolly bats mostly came from the wild. One seller said these shops buy their bats from a wholesale dealer, who hires people to harvest, dry and frame them.

The painted woolly bat is in great demand for the ornamental trade, bought both online and offline for decorations. Image by Vetri Selvan via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Finding young bats in these markets was of particular concern. Baby bats cling to their mothers for the first few weeks of their lives and ride along with her when she hunts or forages. Finding young pups for sale indicates that “[h]unters are taking adults and dependent pups,” Coleman said. “When you remove adult females and their young from wild populations, you are even likelier to cause population declines, especially in animals like bats that reproduce very slowly.” Painted woolly bats birth just one pup a year.

Fieldwork revealed the trade’s impact. When one of the researchers visited the Mekong Delta between June and September 2024 — a region where locals said it’s generally easy to see painted woolly bats — they found just one female after an intensive search. This indicates that local populations are nearly extinct, and those for sale in markets either came from a stockpile or from elsewhere.

Bat scientist Dave Waldien called the findings “unfortunate, but not surprising,” since painted woolly bats are the most popular in trade. Waldien, a member of the IUCN Bat Specialist Group who wasn’t involved in the study, emphasized the importance of this research in highlighting that “the level of threat from the ornamental trade of the painted woolly bat is more significant than previously thought, and that robust and immediate attention is needed to eliminate this threat.”

This image documents ornamental wildlife for sale in HCMC, photographed during a recent study. This shop sold both adult bats and pups. Image courtesy of Nguyen et. al (2026).

Better enforcement and trade monitoring needed

Painted woolly bats are solitary and sparsely distributed, and scientists don’t know much about their life cycle, behavior, or even how many of them are in the wild. “Kerivoula picta is especially hard to study,” Coleman said. “That is exactly what makes the trade a likely conservation concern.” Data on their trade are also patchy; this study is the first to document how many are sold in one of their native countries.

Conservationists say governments of the bat’s range countries should step up to enforce their laws against hunting the species. In Vietnam, those laws come with major loopholes: It’s legal to capture the bats during their nonbreeding season and it’s also legal to sell captive-bred bats, with paperwork to prove it. But there are no known captive-breeding facilities for these insectivorous bats anywhere in the world, researchers say. Since pups have also been found in the trade, scientists say illegal capture is common.

The researchers urge the Vietnamese government to add the species to its national list of endangered, precious and rare animals, which would ban hunting year-round and impose stricter fines and prison terms for violators.

Given that the bats are primarily sold to foreign tourists, experts also suggest regulating trade in this species by adding it to Appendix II of CITES. However, the next CITES summit when that might be considered is at least two years away.

In the interim, range countries can add painted wooly bats to CITES Appendix III, to better monitor international trade from within their borders. That would be “a really big first step in helping regulate the trade and helping countries protect the species in the range countries,” said Shepherd from the Center for Biological Diversity. “Without [Appendix III] listing, there’s no mechanism for controlling or regulating international trade.”

But these mammals face additional threats. Logging and conversion of agricultural plantations into human settlements are erasing their homes.

With striking orange and black streaks on their wings, painted woolly bats are one of the most colorful bats in the world. Image by stingraysilver via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Conservation of this species requires collaboration between governments, conservationists and communities, Waldien said. “In addition to national and international legislation, this should include work with local communities to prevent further collection — and the protection and restoration of the species’ habitat.”

Few people realize the services bats provide. Protecting painted woolly bats — and all bat species — benefits human health and helps produce the food we eat. Like all insectivorous bats, they act as nature’s pest control, keeping insect numbers under check, so they don’t devour crops, and also limiting the spread of insect-borne diseases.

Removing this iconic species from the wild, especially for a senseless trinket trade, will hurt the bats and the ecosystem, Shepherd said. “People don’t need to be hanging this bat on the wall or on their Christmas tree or having it on their desk.”

Top photo: With this species highly sought after as decorations, mostly by foreign tourists, their numbers are dwindling. Image by Abu Hamas via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

This article is originally published by Mongabay. Read the Mongabay article here.

A trail of enormous footprints, criss-crossing slabs of cracked concrete, lead to a battered ranger station in Vietnam’s Pù Mát National Park. Park staff say the wild Asian elephant that left the tracks is as friendly as it is lonely.

Separated from any of the country’s remaining wild herds, the solitary giant satisfies her social appetite by interacting with people at the station. Rangers say the 29-year-old female has been solo since her mother died more than a decade ago. Signs of her visits to the rangers are hard to miss, with craters in the soil left by weighty feet, a fence bent from a playful push, and a dented sign toppled by a frisky trunk.

“The elephant usually comes here to play,” says Nguyễn Công Thành, a ranger at Pù Mát in Vietnam’s north-central Nghệ An Province, as he points out the damage. The wild elephant herd which lives deeper in the forests of Pù Mát — made up of around 15 individuals — is far less friendly, he says.

Nguyễn Công Thành, a ranger at Pù Mát National Park, holds a battered sign which was knocked down by a solitary wild elephant.

Lộc Văn Hùng, a fellow ranger, with a section of the station’s fence that the elephant damaged

Only around 100 wild elephants are estimated to survive in Vietnam, separated into 22 groups across the country. These last survivors of Asia’s once 100,000-strong elephant population face a myriad of threats, including conflict with people, exacerbated by habitat loss.

Drawn to fruit trees, corn, rice and other agricultural produce, a herd of wild elephants can destroy a farmer’s livelihood in a single meal. And when Vietnam’s remaining wild herds interact with humans, the results are often fraught and sometimes fatal.

As pressure mounts from agricultural expansion and other human development, conservationists warn the dwindling number of elephants will soon approach the point of no return in sustaining a viable population.

In the last two years in Pù Mát, rangers allegedly suspect two elephants may have been killed by poisoning in possible acts of retribution following conflicts with humans.

An Asian elephant takes a bath in Vietnam’s Yok Don National Park in May 2023, when a record-setting heat wave swept Vietnam.

With Vietnam’s elephant populations trailing on the very edge of viability, each incident of conflict threatens the continued existence of the species there.

Vietnam’s elephants on the brink

Asian elephants are listed as critically endangered on the Vietnam Red Book of rare and endangered species, while the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List categorize them as endangered at the global level.

A tourist draws a rescued Asian elephant during a tour hosted by NGO Animals Asia in Yok Don National Park, which is estimated to be home to 28–60 wild elephants.

Vietnam’s wild elephant population has been in sharp decline for decades. Huge swathes of forest were destroyed during the 20-year-long American War, and the animals’ habitat has continued to shrink as the country has developed.

Hunted for ivory and the elephant skin trade, and captured from the wild for use in logging and tourism, Vietnam’s wild elephant population has fallen from approximately 2,000 in 1980 to between 91 and 129 in 2022, according to the Vietnam Forest Administration.

The few surviving wild herds live in areas close to Vietnam’s borders with Cambodia and Laos. The largest groups are in three national parks: Cát Tiên, Pù Mát and Yok Don. Even then, Cát Tiên and Pù Mát are home to fewer than 20 elephants, while between 28 and 60 are estimated to live in Yok Don, according to data from the Vietnam Forestry Administration. The rest of the nation’s wild elephants are sparsely scattered across nine provinces, with four provinces counting just a single wild elephant.

Wild Asian elephant herds have declined steadily for decades in Vietnam. As of 2022, 91–129 elephants are estimated to survive across 12 provinces, with the largest herds restricted to three national parks. • Data source: Vietnam Forestry Administration • Graphic: China Dialogue, Anton Delgado

The Vietnam Forestry Administration lists Lâm Đồng Province as elephant habitat. However, no data on the number of individuals is included.

A national plan to save elephants

Vietnam is currently crafting a national action plan on elephant conservation to protect the country’s remaining wild herds. This program will run from 2023 to 2032, and will set a vision to 2050.

Mai Nguyễn, wildlife program manager at Humane Society International (HSI), an animal welfare and conservation NGO, says that national agencies, along with authorities from those provinces where wild elephants cling on, have been meeting with conservation groups in “consultation workshops” and “technical meetings” to develop the action plan.

A sculpture of an Asian elephant herd made of snares and other wildlife traps in Vietnam’s Pù Mát National Park, which is estimated to be home to fewer than 20 wild elephants.

HSI is leading on writing a draft plan, while also providing technical support and encouraging authorities to find “appropriate interventions” to mitigate conflict between elephants and local communities, Mai says. The plan must be signed by Vietnam’s prime minister or the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development before it comes into effect.

But reducing human-elephant conflict is complex, and more information is needed to inform responses, Mai says. “The conflict is unique and it’s also very complicated. To sort this out is not easy and it takes time… We should keep monitoring and learning about the characteristics of the conflict.”

Retaliation and reconciliation

Some traditional methods used to scare elephants away from crops in Vietnam can be harmful to the animals. While many farmers will bang pots, flash lights, and set off firecrackers, some have also used more violent means.

Locals in Cát Tiên have told conservationists about an incident some four years ago in which they threw a Molotov cocktail at a wild male elephant and lit it on fire in an attempt to drive it away. People in the area later reported the elephant is one of the more aggressive animals now.

An Asian elephant munches vegetation in Yok Don National Park, which is home to Vietnam’s largest wild elephant herd.

Conservationists had initially hoped that “bio-fences” such as bee boxes and chili plants could be used to deter elephants, but these passive interventions have been mainly unsuccessful.

Another potential solution, which some are pushing to be included in the conservation plan, is a countrywide compensation program for property destroyed by elephants. These initiatives are intended to prevent acts of retaliation against the animals, and though some exist on the local level, there is no such countrywide mechanism.

“We hope some compensation to local people can settle down the conflict and hopefully we can protect the elephants,” said Thông Phạm, a research manager with Save Vietnam’s Wildlife.

Phước, a fruit vendor, playing with his three-year-old son at an elephant fountain in Buôn Đôn Square, Đắk Lắk province.

Mai Nguyễn at HSI is working to submit a final draft of the action plan to the government in the hopes of it being signed by the end of this year. “To sort this out is not easy,” she says. “We must represent the elephant voice.”

Training for better responses to human-elephant conflict

In late May 2023, Cao Thị Lý, an elephant expert and retired professor from Tây Nguyên University in Đắk Lắk, led a training course on mitigating human-elephant conflict. At the event, approximately an hour’s drive from Pù Mát National Park, we met with conservationists, rangers, and members of a “community quick-response team” dedicated to mitigating human-wildlife conflict around the park. The training course was arranged by nonprofit Fauna & Flora International (FFI), which runs conservation efforts in Pù Mát and backs the response team.

“Out of 13 Asian nations [with extant wild elephant populations], Vietnam is the one with the fewest wild elephants left,” says Lý. “We have to change to help the elephants.”

Cao Thị Lý, a retired professor from Tây Nguyên University in Đắk Lắk and author of a book on human-elephant conflict in Vietnam, leads a training course on the topic with conservationists, rangers and researchers.

Habitat destruction has exacerbated human-elephant conflict, says Đặng Đình Lâm, a member of the quick-response team.

Rubber plantations and slash-and-burn farming near Pù Mát National Park have shrunk elephant habitat and thus availability of elephant food, Lâm says.

“The conflict has two sides. Elephants lack habitat, and because they destroy crops and property, people dislike them,” Lâm says. “I hope that the government and people will be more responsible about protecting elephants.”

Engineers of the forest

“When I was young, I could see elephants everywhere,” says Quỳnh Phạm, driving an e-cart into the 115,000-hectare Yok Don National Park in Vietnam’s verdant Central Highlands, which is home to the country’s largest wild elephant population. Quỳnh is the ethical elephant tourism manager for Animals Asia, a nonprofit working in Vietnam and China to improve the welfare of captive wildlife.

In December 2021, Animals Asia signed a memorandum of understanding with the province of Đắk Lắk (where Yok Don is located) to end elephant rides completely by 2026 and transition to ethical elephant tourism. As of 2022, there were 37 domesticated or captive elephants in Đắk Lắk province, and between 28 and 60 in the wild.

Ten animals previously used for elephant rides now live in Yok Don, under the care of Animals Asia. The elephants roam freely in the park during the day, with mahouts traveling with them to ensure their safety; they are kept on long chains in the park overnight. Visiting tourists can watch the animals grazing, bathing, and mud wallowing from a safe distance.

While far from the hundreds of Quỳnh’s youth, the 10 retired elephants can now play their key natural role in the forest ecosystem.

Trampling through the forest, two females graze on bamboo and plough through thick vegetation — a long way from the elephant rides of their past. Wild Asian elephants do this for 18 hours a day, dispersing seeds and creating new forest trails for smaller species as they go. As elephant populations have plummeted across Asia, this important role as an “engineer” has been left unfilled.

An Asian elephant, rescued by Animals Asia, feeds in Vietnam’s Yok Don National Park. Elephants can eat up to 150 kilograms of vegetation per day.

Prasop Tipprasert, who has worked in elephant conservation for more than 30 years in Southeast Asia, explains that the presence of elephants in the wild indicates a healthy, biodiverse landscape.

“If we cannot keep elephants from extinction, we lose the potential of keeping our forests healthy,” says Prasop, who now works for the Laos-based eco-tourism agency MandaLao Elephant Conservation.

Cao Thị Lý, an expert in human-elephant conflict, points out a sign warning of frequent wild elephant sightings in Vietnam’s Pù Mát National Park.

Lý, the retired professor, says that for elephants to maintain their role as ecosystem engineers in Vietnam’s forests, the country’s government must actively restore and reconnect their habitat to give different populations opportunities to interact and interbreed.

While elephants could once travel through suitable habitat from northern to southern Vietnam, forests have become increasingly fragmented, with conflict with humans becoming “systematic” as forests shrink, she says.

“Due to the conflict between humans and elephants over the small leftover shared resources, bad outcomes arise,” she notes. “The confrontation between humans and elephants has intensified.”

An approximately 40-year-old Asian elephant rescued by Animals Asia treads through Vietnam’s Yok Don National Park

Elephants on the brink in neighboring countries

The decline of elephants in Vietnam is mirrored in neighboring nations. The wild Asian elephant populations of both Laos and Cambodia are estimated to number less than a thousand. In China, barely 300 wild elephants are believed to survive, with their once enormous range now limited to a pocket of the south-western province of Yunnan.

Conflict over resources is a major concern for China’s remaining wild herds. In 2021, 14 elephants usually resident in a nature reserve in Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna region began to move northwards. On their months-long journey, the elephants destroyed property, creating a challenge for authorities in finding a balance between elephant conservation and protecting citizens’ dwellings and livelihoods. According to local authorities, 150,000 people were evacuated from the elephants’ path to avoid potentially dangerous incidents, and the government paid out a total of US$770,000 in property damages.

Farmland surrounds Pù Mát National Park, one of the few locations where wild elephants cling on in Vietnam.

Sitting just steps from where Pù Mát’s solo female elephant is often spotted, Cao Thị Lý underlines how important habitat protection is if there is to be any chance of saving the last elephants of Vietnam.

“Vietnam is the weakest in everything in elephant conservation,” she says. “We have the chance to help the elephants to keep growing their population in the future, but we need to rebuild forests.”

This story was originally produced by China Dialogue in collaboration with Southeast Asia Globe with additional reporting by Nguyễn Háo Thanh Thảo. It has been republished with permission from China Dialogue.

In April 2023, in the first downpour of southern Vietnam’s rainy season, the narrow rented room where Mã Thị Diệp and her children were staying in Hồ Chí Minh City was inundated by knee-high water.

“It flooded in from the street and came up from the drain in the bathroom. We couldn’t stop it,” recalls the lottery ticket vendor. “The liquid was black like coal and so stinky I almost fainted.” The water subsided after two hours, and the family cleaned the room until midnight. “My skin got itchy a bit, and it’s lucky we don’t have anything too valuable to get damaged,” she adds, half-jokingly.

Originally from Vietnam’s southern province of Sóc Trăng, Diệp’s family — and many other migrants among HCMC’s 9.4 million residents — live in District 12, to the north of the city centre. Despite lying on the higher and supposedly drier side of the city, District 12 has become one of its most flood-prone areas in recent years. Generally it is Saigon’s outskirts, predominantly home to migrants and lower-income households, that suffer the highest rates of subsidence and flooding.

The 2023 rainy season began a month earlier than usual in southern Vietnam, arriving in April. Heavy bursts of rainfall in which 100mm of water fell in one hour used to happen around once every five years last century, but became a daily occurrence in June and July this year, according to local authorities. Research anticipates that heavy rainfall will inundate the city’s underdeveloped drainage system more regularly in the coming decades.

This dwelling in District 2 of HCMC, which is home to many migrants from the Mekong Delta, flooded following a downpour in November 2021. Photo by Cương Trần.

These extreme weather trends feed into a worrying wider picture. HCMC is one of the world’s fastest-sinking coastal cities, alongside Tianjin and Shanghai in China, and Semarang and Jakarta in Indonesia. The city is also at increasing risk of substantial flooding from rising sea levels: a one-meter rise would be enough to submerge a fifth of the city by 2100, according to a 2020 government report.

The economic engine of southern Vietnam, Saigon produces 22% of the country’s GDP. Chronic flooding is currently estimated to cost the city US$1.3 billion annually, rising to US$8.7 billion — or 3% of GDP — by 2050.

“It is a city built on water,” says Nguyễn Hồng Quân, an expert in environmental hydrology and climate change at Vietnam National University. “And now it is put in front of a new set of changes. Without proper planning, more severe flooding is certain in the future.”

Infrastructure outpaced by urban sprawl

Long-time District 8 resident Nguyễn Tấn Lợi says this swampy region was covered by rice fields and fish ponds until the early 1990s. It has since been built over with university campuses and residential wards. “The city’s surface is now mostly paved by concrete, with little open soil for the water to seep into,” says Hồng Quân. “[Rainwater] is flushed into the outdated sewers, which can hardly handle it and eventually spill it out back to the street.”

In the city’s southern reaches, Nguyễn Trung Hiếu and his neighbors also face inundation. His neighborhood in District 8 — one of HCMC’s poorest districts — is flooded twice a month between September and February by the Bà Tàng Canal that runs through it. “The tides get higher and higher, by roughly 5cm a year,” he says. Hiếu has raised his floor “a few times already” and the residents have all paid towards work to raise their shared road.

Nearly half of HCMC’s area lies less than one meter above sea level. It is also criss-crossed by a network of tide-influenced rivers and canals that covers approximately 21% of the city. This network is one reason why the city has been an important trade port for the past two centuries for ships carrying agricultural goods from the Mekong Delta and other areas of southern Vietnam. Following the war in the 1960s–1970s, it became the country’s manufacturing and financial hub.

HCMC’s District 8 is a low-lying, historically swampy area that has been built over in recent years, hindering water drainage. Photo by Thanh Huế.

This explosive economic growth came with rapid urbanization, stacked mostly upon soft, alluvial soil. Plumbing infrastructure was slow to catch up to the urban sprawl, so groundwater extraction using makeshift wells became widespread. Thousands of these wells remain in HCMC, pumping groundwater for industrial, domestic and agricultural uses. Where extraction of groundwater exceeds the rate at which it can be replenished, this can cause the water table to lower, and the ground above it to sink.

Between 1991 and 2015, Vietnam’s wider Mekong Delta area sank by an average of approximately 18cm during those 24 years; a 2017 study found groundwater overexploitation to be the main culprit. The gradual subsidence of this area is forcing the poorest inhabitants with the least amount of land to migrate, most likely to HCMC and adjacent industrial hubs.

According to a 2015 study, HCMC itself subsided by an average of 8mm per year during 2006–2010. The most severe levels of subsidence, reaching 70mm per year, were noted in the city’s eastern outskirts, along the Saigon River. Following municipal efforts to reduce groundwater extraction and defend against sea-level rise, a 2020 study found that subsidence levels had improved to between 3.3mm and 53mm per year during 2017-2019. However, the fastest subsidence rates were still to be found in the city’s outskirts. Meanwhile, rising sea levels are projected to displace 78% of HCMC’s inhabitants by 2100.

Disproportionate impacts on HCMC’s residents

A 2016 World Bank study found that HCMC’s slums (“densely built small households and shelters that have [a] predominantly semi‐permanent character”) are disproportionately exposed to the consequences of flooding, with 68–85% being at risk, compared to an average of 63–68% across all of the city’s urban areas.

HCMC is Vietnam’s strongest migration magnet, but the city’s environmental challenges tend to exacerbate the problems faced by many newcomers. “We found migrants were initially healthier than non-migrants, but then their health declined really quickly over time,” says Hang Ngo, a public health research scientist. Last year, her research into migrants from the Mekong Delta found that most live in small, poorly ventilated dwellings with substandard hygiene conditions. If these dwellings are in flood-prone areas, the risk of dengue fever and skin infections increases.

Lê Văn Lợi, a garment worker by day and motorbike taxi driver by night who lives in Bình Chánh District on Saigon’s western outskirts, shares that floods are his biggest fear: the waters can knock over drivers, while fixing a waterlogged bike costs more than VND150,000 (US$6). “Not worth it for a few dollars’ ride,” says the 29-year-old. During particularly rainy spells, Lợi’s income drops substantially.

Crucially, the city’s low-income and migrant populations, who tend to live in areas of high flood risk with underdeveloped local infrastructure, usually have fewer resources to protect them from flooding. “It is like a vicious circle,” says Cao Vũ Quỳnh Anh, a University of Tokyo researcher who has studied how HCMC residents cope with floods.

A road on the outskirts of Saigon’s District 2, flooded following heavy rain in June 2018. Photo by Cương Trần.

Grey, green and communal problem-solving

The Vietnamese government is currently betting on engineering to hold back the water in its biggest city. But progress so far has been slow. For example, a drainage infrastructure project for the city was proposed in 2001, but 20 years later, its construction was less than 50% complete. Another project, which seeks to protect a 570 square kilometer area encompassing the city centre with ring dykes, sluiceways and water pumps, is currently behind schedule. Insufficient interest in such projects from both city authorities and private investors is reportedly a factor in these delays.

Critics have pointed out that these flood defense projects are too limited in scope however, because they are mainly concerned with the old, central areas. HCMC’s urban sprawl is outpacing protection plans. “These ‘grey’ solutions may help soothe the flooding problems, but they are not enough,” says Hồng Quân.

According to research published in June 2023, the deployment of “small-scale rainwater detention measures” (also known as the “sponge city” approach) would be beneficial in Saigon. Such measures would include installing green roofs, rain barrels, porous sidewalks and water-detention basins. The research found that these smaller-scale, fragmented measures are a “highly complementary adaptation pathway” when deployed alongside large-scale engineering interventions.

Quỳnh Anh says the city is following the same reactive adaptation approach as other Asian coastal cities like Tokyo, Jakarta and Manila. This approach means “fewer choices of measures are left and time is very tight for any solution,” she says.

According to both Hồng Quân and Quỳnh Anh, Vietnam’s most populous city currently lacks a comprehensive flood-mitigation plan that connects solutions together. But for such a plan to materialise, Quỳnh Anh says “better communication between the city and its people” is essential. “Understanding is very important. It helps the city to come up with more applicable adaptation plans, and the residents can be proactive in coping with flooding.”

Meanwhile, both Mã Thị Diệp and Nguyễn Trung Hiếu are running out of solutions. Diệp has moved her family to a new neighborhood on higher ground, but she says she cannot afford a more expensive room if this one floods. And Hiếu knows the tide will keep climbing, but he cannot keep raising his home: “If we lift the floor any higher, it will touch the ceiling.”

This story was originally produced by China Dialogue and has been republished with permission.

Compared to the average Vietnamese, I might be thinking about trashcans a smidgen too much — not just any trashcan, but the infamous penguin-shaped trashcans that are ubiquitous at every corner of our public spaces.

You know what I’m talking about. These bins are usually the size of a burly child, made of glass fiber-reinforced plastic, and are shaped like penguins with their mouths agape. Sometimes a call-to-action text is painted on their belly, with the most commonly seen phrase being “hãy cho tôi rác / please give me trash.”

Vietnam’s relationship with littering, recycling, and waste management is complicated, to say the least, but our relationship with trashcans is very simple: we don’t have enough of them, and the ones that are available aren’t treated with the respect they deserve. This shortcoming makes each can’s presence quite noticeable wherever they’re around, especially quirkily designed ones like the penguin bin.

Cute but creepy, mostly creepy, in a Five Night at Freddy's kind of way.

Novelty trashcan is an uncommon genre of public amenities, but not unheard of; I’ve encountered all manner of bins in the shape of animals, fruits, and even famous cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse. Their natural habitats, however, tend to be areas that children often frequent, like playgrounds, amusement parks, and kindergartens. Only the penguin trashcan proliferates indiscriminately across the country, like Vietnam’s equivalent of the basic bird Pokémon you would spend 5 Poke Balls to catch at Level 5 on Route 1.

Why penguins, you may ask. I’ve thought about this a lot too, but alas, haven’t found a definitive answer. A handful of internet memes allude to the possible existence of a similar penguin design in the Anglosphere; they bear the text “use me,” the main reason why the internet found them funny. The majority of search results point to their significant prevalence in India and Vietnam; neither has endemic populations of penguins, but they share a similar public littering problem.

Perhaps it was a generic stock design that a contractor had readily available for park officials to buy in bulk, or perhaps the penguin was chosen for its unique biology that mirrors the gulping movement of trash — it doesn’t have teeth and consumes food by swallowing fish and crustaceans whole. We might never know. If you have the answer, please reach out.

When Pokemon Go first came to Vietnam, one of the penguin trashcans in Saigon got marked as a PokeStop.

Whatever the reason might be, some research has shown that visually striking can designs — including the use of eye-catching colors or unusual shapes — can help reduce littering by attracting human attention. There might be a method to the madness, after all, and the penguin shape might serve a public cleanliness purpose rather than being whimsical just for whimsy’s sake. 

Sometimes I wonder if the animal trashcan can be elevated into part of a larger effort to educate the Vietnamese public on our native species. The penguin is a distant entity, but the endangerment of animals like sao la, Irrawaddy dolphin, and Mekong giant catfish hits much closer to home. Could the bins be shaped like them instead?

Then again, as someone who appreciates the animal kingdom at large and Vietnam’s biodiversity in particular, I have always felt a vague sense of unease over putting trash in the mouth of a penguin, even though that penguin is a plastic object specifically designed to receive trash. It begs the question of who we’re tidying up for? We’ve all seen that tragic video a few years ago showing rescuers removing a straw from a sea turtle’s nostril. Am I trying to save a turtle by putting my bubble tea straws inside a penguin? Perhaps wild animals, be it in trashcan form or real, might not be the best receptacle for our disgusting trash.

With plastics claiming many of the headlines worldwide and constituting a major issue in Vietnam, scant attention is being paid to other recyclable materials, namely cardboard and aluminum.

On any given day, in every neighborhood, local collectors can be seen pedaling bicycles or driving motorized carts, piling on mounds of flattened cardboard boxes and bags of aluminum cans. These industrious individuals, along with trash collectors, are at the forefront of the recycling industry in Saigon.

Living in proximity to recycling centers in District 7, I have trod the dusty, two-kilometer-long path along Dao Tri Street numerous times, bearing witness to the daily parade of local collectors gathering their materials. This labor-intensive work is mostly carried out by women who have migrated from rural areas. Talking with a few of them, I found that their lives are generally not easy, having left family and farm for higher wages in Saigon. They live together to defray costs and send funds back to their families each month.

I asked one of the women, Uyen, about a typical day in her life. She generally starts her daily rounds at 7am, when stores open. Stopping primarily at mini-marts that get daily deliveries of goods in cardboard cases, she completes the first sweep by 11am. From there, she delivers her haul to a collection shop or “recycling middleman.” She is paid VND2,000 per kilogram of flattened cardboard. Most of these women have established good relationships with stores and businesses in the area and receive their flattened boxes and cans, as opposed to them being left in the street for collection.

Uyen dropping off her morning haul of cardboard and cans at the collection center.

After a brief lunch break, she begins a second collection cycle, at times supplementing her haul with plastic bottles (for which she is paid VND7,000 per kilo) or flattened aluminum beer cans (at VND19,000 per kilo). Her day ends around 6pm, unless another collection sweep is warranted. Belying the fact that this is a day job, I have seen these collectors working late into the night, separating the various materials for delivery the next morning.

Late-morning delivery activity at the collection center.

Members of my friend Hung’s family have been acting as recycling middlemen or collectors/processors for over 20 years, and have developed a rapport with a number of these grassroots laborers. Their family business collects and separates plastic bottles, scrap plastic and metal, aluminum cans and cardboard.

Hung (center) and his family at their recycling collection center.

Su, Con and Muoi separate assorted plastic into the proper containers.

They alerted me to a cardboard drop-off run, so that I could drive with them for a short distance to the recycling facility and witness the process. Entering a cavernous building, roughly the size of a basketball arena, the truck is first weighed with its complete cargo; then unloaded onto the floor. The truck is then re-weighed after disgorging its load, and the vendor is then compensated on the delivered weight of the cardboard.

Truck after truck arrived, and suddenly the building was transformed into a beehive of activity. Two bulldozers wrangled the growing mounds of cardboard toward the conveyor belt. The bales, which average 1,100 kilograms each, emerged inexorably from the compactor to await their stacking onto a flatbed truck for delivery to a larger processing center.

An employee at the compacting facility sorting packing material from the cardboard boxes.

One of the two bulldozers pushing boxes onto the compacter unit. Finished bales are in the background.

Operating the cardboard compactor forming the bales.

The cavernous cardboard facility with compacted bales in the foreground.

Speaking with the plant manager, Nam, I was told they handle three types of cardboard: foldable boxes, like a cereal box; rigid boxes, like computer or phone boxes; and corrugated shipping boxes, for moving and storing goods.

According to Cardboard Balers, a company based in the United Kingdom, recycling cardboard requires just 75% of the energy needed to make new cardboard, so it makes sense that recycling cardboard is a more sustainable option than cutting down trees to make virgin paper products. Cardboard is made from wood fiber, so recycling saves both landfill space and trees. Most cardboard products can be recycled, including boxes, paper towel and the inner rolls of toilet paper, which also reduces the amount of paper which countries have to import. Recycling one ton of used cardboard saves approximately 46 gallons (174 liters) of crude oil, while the majority of the world's shipped products use cardboard packaging, so it's advantageous to recycle from a cost-benefit perspective.

After returning from the cardboard run, I sat with Hung to get his perspective on recycling. “My uncle started this business about 30 years ago, and my dad studied from him and opened his own business, with another uncle handling machine parts for recycling,” he shared.

Hung discussing the future of recycling in Saigon.

The business has changed over the years as it grew.

"Twenty years ago they just bought plastic, aluminum and metal. Now we take in a variety of products, including cardboard,” Hung said. “Loyalty is a big part of the equation when it comes to attracting collectors. We pay a fair price and the locals know they can trust us. Everyone’s involved. My dad runs the business now and drives the truck to the various processing centers. My mom supervises the scale and payments, and [the team and I] do the heavy lifting.”

The rotund, heavy-duty sacks which hold aluminum cans top off at around 60 kilograms each, and the ones for plastic bottles can top 90 kilograms.

Hung lifting a delivery of cardboard onto the scale as his mom, Muoi, watches and records the weight.

Hai, Hung's dad, sews shut one of the massive bags containing plastic bottles.

Muoi recording deliveries at the shop.

Su lifting a huge bag of aluminum cans.

Hung went on to explain that he expects to graduate from university later this year with a degree in environmental engineering. When I asked if he would then join a larger recycling company, he said that he would apply his knowledge to help grow his family business, but he also wants to pursue a PhD in the field.

A similar scenario of truck weighing before and after unloading was evident when I accompanied the team on a run to out to Binh Chanh District to the aluminum can recycling center there.

Crushed aluminum cans before being baled.

Unloading 10 bags of aluminum cans and miscellaneous metal items, weighing up to 750 kilograms in total.

As to the future of recycling in Saigon, Hung reflected that other countries or states have comprehensive policies in place, whereas Vietnam still has no complete plan which includes tax exemptions or incentives. So if waste facilities become overloaded, he hopes this will drive new policies to address the issue. Looking ahead, he would like to concentrate more on plastics, and even buy a machine that cuts and washes small volumes of plastic for more efficient recycling.

While plastic and other man-made products continue to be major issues as urbanization spreads across the country, the intelligent use of recycled materials, such as cardboard and aluminum cans, can help alleviate some of the strain on the city’s resources, and the people doing this back-breaking work should not be overlooked.

This article was originally published in 2020.

Women in the Mekong Delta face numerous challenges, including limited access to educational opportunities and agricultural occupations threatened by the effects of climate change. A source of hope in this economically impoverished area, however, blooms in bright pink.

The lotus, widely considered a symbol of Vietnam, has long been used as a metaphor to describe Vietnamese people: from the mud grows a strong and resilient flower that provides nourishment. The plant is literally providing for women in the region thanks to a multifaceted program supported by WWF-Viet Nam as part of the larger Climate Resilient by Nature - Mekong project (CRxN Mekong).

Native to the Mekong Delta, lotus plants grow in rivers and lakes across a landscape significantly altered due to human development and agriculture. For decades, farmers looking to maximize food production have erected dikes during the flood season to grow a third crop of conventional rice per year. Doing so disrupts water cycles, which leads to soil degradation and loss of nutrients, while the chemicals needed for the plants further pollute the ecosystem. Lotus represents an alternative.

WWF-Viet Nam's lotus planting models support farmers growing lotus during the flood season. After four to four and a half months, the stems and seeds of the harvested plants can be processed and sold for consumption, bringing in approximately US$1,867 per hectare, a significant boon to local livelihoods. The environmental impacts of the program are similarly profound, with the model revealing lower greenhouse gas emissions as well as better water retention and quality, improved soil health and sedimentation, and a healthier biodiversity, all compared to a third season of conventional rice.

The vibrant natural ecosystems and human communities in the Mekong Delta depend on one another.

To encourage local farmers to adopt the lotus planting model, WWF-Viet Nam has provided technical and financial support to nine households in Tân Hưng, Vĩnh Châu, Vĩnh Thạnh communes, Tây Ninh province (formerly Vĩnh Đại, Vĩnh Lợi, Vĩnh Châu A, and Thạnh Hưng communes, Long An province). With the guidance of experts from An Giang Climate Change, the farmers are taught cultivation techniques and given organic fertilizers to prevent and reduce disease on lotus plants. Saigoneer visited several of the sites to understand what the project looks like in action and the impact it has on women in the area.

An Inspiring Visit to the Lotus Fields

Amidst the crisp lines of rice fields that make a checkerboard of the landscape, lotus fields are messy scribbles of green and pink. To reach one, we had to take a small boat. Standing on a narrow embankment, we could just make out a group of women working up to their waists in water, their nón lá occasionally coming into view between flower blossoms, hands rising to pluck seed pods and drop them in baskets attached to their backs. After 15 minutes, the group had worked its way towards us, and we were able to speak with Lê Thị Thòng, a local farmer who was spending her morning harvesting the field.

Thòng explained that she had been planting lotus before this project began, but “before, when I planted lotus, it sometimes succeeded, but without this process, the lotus often got diseases. The engineers supported clean lotus planting, and the technique is very good.”

Lê Thị Thòng collects lotus pods.

Being able to plant lotus that reliably yields income has wide-reaching implications for the women in the region. Thòng uses the income for household needs, including more nutritious meals and her children’s education, which is particularly relevant because having work in the fields near her home means she can be available to pick them up from school, as opposed to industrial site jobs that are often unavailable to women because they require traveling great distances.

Nguyễn Thị Diễm Trinh in front of her home lotus field.

Nguyễn Thị Diễm Trinh, another lotus farmer, echoed these sentiments while explaining that the lotus program also expands her role in the community. After speaking with her about the specific methods of planting and harvesting lotus, she invited Saigoneer for lunch. As she was bringing out plates of thịt kho, khổ qua, and stir-fried lotus stems, people kept arriving at the front yard table. A WWF-Viet Nam representative, a neighbor, and a local official all happened to be stopping by for various routine purposes and were quickly told to grab a plate and sit down. The impromptu gathering resembled the more formal meetings held at her house, where “we gather 20–30 people — then we eat and talk together, it’s fun and friendly,” she explained. Indeed, the lotus planting gives women like Trinh and Thòng a role in local conversations and decision-making that elevates their standing in their homes and community.

Sources of Optimism Inside a Lotus Factory

Every few minutes, a truck would arrive and a group of workers would hustle over to unload bundles of lotus stalks for parceling out across the factory floor, where women seated on plastic stools were washing, cutting, and sorting the stems. Large basins soaked and fermented the pieces on the other side of the cavernous space while a small team worked on preparing and packaging them in bags with bright labels, ready to be sent to grocery stores throughout the country and abroad. Tâm Lotus, a small business in Tây Ninh Commune, was founded in response to the fact that the area produces a significant amount of lotus stems, but had limited to no market for them. The company’s existence not only offers easy and reliable purchasing of the plants harvested in the fields, but also gives women vital occupational opportunities.

By acting as a gathering point for distribution via larger companies, Tâm Lotus allows the largely female workforce to work close to home and thus support their families. During our visit, we even met a woman who occasionally stops by with her adopted grandchild. “Everyone here really loves the child. They often buy little things for him. They know the child is an orphan—the parents separated—so Mr. Tâm, his wife, and their family often give things to the child.”

Like the women who plant and harvest the lotus, the women in the factory told us that the work offers them more than a stable income; it brings peace to their homelives and amplifies their voices. Hương, the plant manager, said, “Before, as a woman staying home to care for the kids, without earning money, my voice didn’t carry as much weight. Now that I work and earn money, I can be more equal in discussions.” She continued, “I feel more comfortable. Earning money and having a stable income makes me feel freer to do what I want.”

The improved livelihood conditions for women, thanks to the lotus activities, coincide with positive environmental impacts for the local environment and broader upstream wetland ecosystems of the Mekong Delta. Compared to conventional rice farming, the lotus model results in a 73.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, it leads to better water quality and quantity, with over 662,000 cubic meters of water stored per hectare of crop. Meanwhile, soil fertility is improved, which reduces the need for fertilizers in the subsequent season while strengthening the biodiversity in an environment that is home to more than 86 plant species, 51 fish species, and 73 waterbird species.

Nguyễn Thị Diễm Trinh at home with her young son.

One sees the image of a lotus flower nearly every day in Vietnam. From large public fountains and decor to branding elements to fashions, the beautiful symbol of the nation is everywhere. After learning more about its role in the WWF-Viet Nam’s CRxN Mekong project, one can look upon it with an even greater appreciation, knowing it's not merely an aspirational symbol, but a true source of positive change for the people and land.

The Mekong Delta is developing faster than Google Maps can keep up with. A stretch of road that was too narrow to accommodate cars and required a transition to motorbikes just six months ago was under construction during our August visit. Gargantuan machines for laying pulverized gravel inched aside to let our 7-seater pass so we could reach the home of Nguyễn Thị Thu Thủy to check in on her small fish drying home business.

A peek into the behind-the-scenes fish drying operation at Nguyễn Thị Thu Thủy's home.

Thủy explained that the expanded road will allow her to more easily sell larger quantities of the packaged, dried fish to a more diverse set of buyers. This theme of increased output and growth filled our conversation: her family produces more of the delicious dried cá chốt than her parents ever did; every season she asks her husband and neighbors to buy more fish from the flooded fields for her to process and dry; she dreams of a de-scaling machine so she can take in more cá lóc; and the drying cabinet WWF-Viet Nam provided her via a revolving fund for women allows her to work on cloudy or rainy days, resulting in more money for household needs.

Increased output across agricultural and aquacultural activities is just one element of broader efforts to improve local livelihoods while safeguarding and restoring natural areas in the Mekong Delta. In particular, programs like the Climate Resilient by Nature - Mekong project (CRxN Mekong) aim to mitigate negative environmental impacts while remaining easy to integrate into traditional lifestyles across the region. In Tân Hưng, Vĩnh Châu, and Vĩnh Thạnh communes of the new Tây Ninh province (formerly Vĩnh Châu A, Vĩnh Đại, Vĩnh Lợi, and Thạnh Hưng communes), six livelihood models, along with access to microfinancing and education initiatives, are building on existing behaviors in coordination with local governments and communities to provide scalable examples for how livelihoods and nature can benefit from nature-based solutions.

The Mekong Delta's many waterways and nutrient-rich soil support thriving market scenes.

Hope Floats in the Flooded Fields

“In the past, our grandparents grew [floating rice], so it has a nostalgic value. Growing it again now feels like reviving something from the past — a way to reconnect with old memories,” Nguyễn Ngọc Điền, the chairman of the floating rice cooperative’s board, explained to Saigoneer. More than a heartwarming means of connecting to homeland and heritage, the ancient variety of rice is opening new economic opportunities while helping to protect and replenish the water and soil.

Nguyễn Ngọc Điền sits beside a floating rice field.

Unlike the modern method of erecting dikes to plant conventional rice during the flood season, growing floating rice requires no manipulation of the flood waters. Because the rice doesn’t disrupt the natural flow of water, nor does it require chemicals and fertilizers, it allows the soil to naturally rejuvenate. These powerful impacts explain why WWF-Viet Nam invites experts from Cần Thơ University for support. Moreover, WWF-Viet Nam supplies seeds and agricultural drones.

Nguyễn Thị Bé plants both conventional and floating rice.

Of course, money talks, and bottom-line economics and familiar habits drive decisions in one of Vietnam’s most impoverished regions. One local farmer and cooperative member, Nguyễn Thị Bé, told Saigoneer that “it has to have benefits. In general, this floating seasonal rice — well, here people are used to eating soft, sticky rice, so eating this one, they don’t really like it. But if you cook it the right way, it’s actually very good.”

In addition to helping introduce ways to cook the floating rice, such as in porridge, to appeal to local tastes, WWF-Viet Nam has been helping to connect the community cooperative with buyers who can sell the rice to overseas consumers who are more receptive to its positive health benefits and accepting of its texture. Processing the floating rice into noodles, milk-based goods, and rice paper before export has proven to be a successful approach. The Khải Nam corporation, for example, is working towards Halal certification for the floating rice products to be exported to Malaysia and other Asian markets, as well as European markets such as England and Germany, which has resulted in a request to increase floating rice plantation areas to 200 ha, up from only 10 ha last year. “This makes cooperative members more confident, knowing their product is reaching international markets,” noted Điền.

Harvesting conventional rice frequently involves environmentally-damaging field burning.

Floating Rice Makes Way for Fish and Mushrooms

The success of the floating rice coincides with other project models, including fish cultivation. Native fish, including cá rô and cá lóc, can thrive in the flooded fields amongst the floating rice. Absent pesticides and chemicals, the fish grow naturally and can be harvested for drying and processing, as Thủy has been doing. Her work is supported by a revolving fund that has provided money from a total initial loan amount of 840 million VND (US$32,000) to 82 women for the acquisition of technologies and materials.

Thanks to new technologies, fish can be dried on rainy days.

Compared to conventional rice, floating rice yields a larger amount of post-harvest organic material. This plant matter, rather than being burned, which releases significant amounts of carbon into the air, can be used for growing mushrooms. This will allow the CRxN program to supply households with clean floating rice straw beginning at the start of 2026, supplementing the technical know-how for cultivating mushrooms that is already being provided. After only 45 days, the mushrooms can be harvested and sold for approximately US$384.

Mushroom growing is particularly appealing because it can be undertaken while remaining close to one’s home, which allows women to participate while caring for children and other household tasks. Word of the project has spread in the local communities, with 18 new farmers registering to receive support for the project. Current mushroom farmer, Trần Thanh Tâm, summarized his experiences to Saigoneer: “What I like most is that I can make use of straw to create a clean product, giving people safe mushrooms to eat. They’re great for vegetarians, and also good for parties — chicken steamed with straw mushrooms is very delicious.”

Trần Thanh Tâm monitors the growth of his mushrooms.

Beside the Floating Rice, Lotus, Hyacinth, and Education Bloom

While floating rice is a pivotal element of the CRxN Mekong project, not all models directly involve it. For example, farmers who do not plant conventional or floating rice during the flood season can use their land to grow lotus. Supported via seeds, organic fertilizer, and the development of commercial networks, farmers can supplement their incomes by growing lotus plants. The seeds and stems are both processed as commercial food. Compared to growing three conventional rice crops a year, switching one to flood-based lotus cultivation produces a significantly smaller amount of carbon. Evidence suggests that the model could be a potential opportunity for future integration in the carbon market.

Even before producing carbon credits, the lotus industry is providing significant benefits to local communities, particularly amongst women. Like growing mushrooms, it allows women to stay closer to home, where they can care for family members. Trần Thị Kim Mai, an employee at a lotus processing facility, explained: “Before, I worked in a more hectic job far from home. Now that there’s a workshop here, I can work very close to my house.”

Moreover, steady work has profound psychological effects. Mai furthered: “The sisterhood relationship here is cheerful, people are sociable … Working here feels like part of my life, something I need every day.”

A similar sense of purpose and value is experienced by the women involved in the lục bình weaving group. A CRxN education project invites consultants to communities to teach women how to transform the weed plant into valuable home goods. This transforms the plant from an onerous clogger of waterways into a flexible source of income that empowers women and strengthens families.

While CRxN Mekong’s education efforts focus largely on increasing flood-based agriculture and aquaculture practices, there is significant attention paid to social and cultural topics, including gender equality courses. These teachings, combined with broad improvements in household incomes, have resulted in “more peace at home,” as one resident shared with us.

On our many trips to CRxN Mekong projects over the years, Saigoneer has been invited into countless homes to share meals, hear stories, and learn about the hope people have for the future of the region. In the midst of these very personal moments, it's difficult to keep sight of the program’s larger impact. In coordination with An Giang Climate Change experts, invaluable data and information are being gathered that can be used to devise and test new ideas for Nature-Based Solutions for implementation throughout the Mekong region.

The natural environment, in particular, lingers in our memory after each visit. Graceful egrets fold wings like book pages in Láng Sen’s melaleuca trees, and turtles disappear in tannin-rich waters that snake and tangle beneath lotus leaves. Soft white cajeput flowers burst open against blue skies, and red-tailed laughingthrush’s calls echo. While in this beautiful, wild place, humans may not be in sight, but their impact is everywhere. From agricultural runoff to disrupted flood cycles to the encroachment of farming practices, the actions of human communities threaten the priceless ecosystem. Only by considering both of them via sustainable livelihood initiatives like the CRxN Mekong can we ensure they both prosper for decades to come.

Countries in mainland Southeast Asia have stark differences in renewable energy strategies, balancing them with ample but controversial hydropower and entrenched interests. While solar power has become accessible and cost effective, many of these nations have struggled to make wind power an essential part of renewable energy strategies, despite having locations with high potential. Meanwhile, others have become regional wind power leaders, such as Vietnam. In this explainer, we explore how various mainland Southeast Asian countries are engaging with wind power development.

Top image: Wind turbines in Phan Rang, a coastal city in southern Vietnam. Photo by Thoại Phạm via Alamy.

Thailand

While Thailand has aggressively pursued solar and hydro, it made a slow start on wind power, despite having high-wind areas in the north and northeast. The first project, in Phuket, began in 1983, but projects exceeding one megawatt (MW) did not begin until 2008. The country only reached around 400MW by 2019. As of 2023, wind makes up only around 3% (around 1.5 gigawatts) of the kingdom’s installed capacity.

There is potential for 13-17 gigawatts (GW) of onshore wind energy across the country. And while most of Thailand’s wind power comes from ground-mounted projects, there is potential for another 18–36GW per year offshore in the Andaman Sea. 

Solar has made huge strides in Thailand in recent years, with a current estimated capacity of 3GW and plans to reach 39GW by 2040. Despite this, Thailand is relying on an energy future ruled by liquefied natural gas (LNG), including the building of new infrastructure in Rayong and the Gulf of Thailand.

The current draft of Thailand’s 2025–2037 Power Development Plan (PDP) aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and net-zero emissions by 2065. The plan includes installing an additional 7GW of wind power capacity. 

While the draft (due to be passed by the end of 2025) is aggressively pursuing renewable energy in solar, wind and biomass, its critics claim the government’s energy demand projections are too high: it predicts that the current supply must more than double by 2037. Other criticisms are that the current plan is over-reliant on more traditional energy projects, such as LNG, and that it is holding back the development of renewables. 

Traditionally, Thailand’s supply chain for building wind power plants has been provided by foreign interests. As the kingdom ramps up its renewables efforts for net-zero targets, however, a concerted push has been made to produce and develop wind power components domestically.

Thailand’s leading wind energy developer, Wind Energy Holding, currently operates eight wind power plants. In June, the company announced it was preparing 2GW of projects in line with the current PDP. Yeong Guan Energy Technology, a Chinese company, plans to begin wind power component production trials in Thailand in 2025.

Thai companies are also investing in wind power abroad. Late last year, BCPG Public Company Limited, a renewable-energy subsidiary of the partially state-owned conglomerate Bangchak Corporation, announced it was acquiring a firm that operates two wind power plants in Vietnam.

Thailand also funds controversial hydropower dams on the Mekong mainstream and its tributaries, in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. These projects have been linked to declining fisheries and unseasonable flooding and droughts, affecting biodiversity and riverine livelihoods. As such, more emphasis is being placed by environmental groups on the use of non-hydro renewables, such as wind and solar. 

At present, the push for renewable energy is reviving Thailand’s wind power prospects, as is the current Feed-in-Tariff system, in which producers are offered fixed prices to provide power to the grid. But the PDP 2025-2037 will be essential in deciding how diversified the kingdom’s renewable future will be.

Laos

The energy plan of Laos has centered around being the “Battery of Asia,” using the nation’s natural resources to create hydropower that it sells to its Southeast Asian neighbors and China.

However, the use of the Mekong’s resources has been a heavy source of contention in the Greater Mekong region, so Laos has taken steps to include more solar and wind projects. 

The most widely publicized of its upcoming wind projects is the Power China-produced Thai collaboration that was completed this year, the Monsoon Wind Power project (MWP). It is the first large-scale ground-mounted wind farm in landlocked Laos and has been touted as the largest in Southeast Asia. Continuing the Battery of Asia model with wind power, the 250MW onshore Trường Sơn wind project is expected to supply energy to neighboring Vietnam after its planned completion date later in 2025.

The April 2023 groundbreaking ceremony for the Monsoon Wind Power project in Vientiane, Laos. Photo by Kaikeo Saiyasane via Xinhua/Alamy.

Both Thailand and China have played crucial roles in the energy infrastructure of Laos, in terms of development and power purchase agreements. The MWP project was bankrolled by the Thai company Impact Electrons Siam, and is being rolled out as a prototype that could potentially be used in Laos as a viable form of export energy. 

Around 80% of the electricity produced by Laos is exported to other countries. The MWP project features a 500 kilovolt transmission line to neighboring Vietnam, 22 kilometers of which will be in Laos and 43 kilometers in Vietnam, which has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement for the project. 

Straddling the provinces of Sekong and Attapeu, the MWP project contains 133 wind turbines. According to a quarterly environmental and social monitoring report, it has affected 934 households across 26 villages, with agricultural land most affected. The report identified 210 hectares of agricultural land as temporarily or permanently changed, along with impacts on 112 hectares of forest. Projections from the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank also noted local anecdotal evidence of biodiversity loss in the project development area.

Though the project was only completed in April, Laos is already moving toward a wind farm that is twice as big: the AMI Savannakhet, a 1,200MW wind farm in Savannakhet province, occupying nearly 2,700 hectares. 

In 2023, it was estimated that non-hydro renewables made up less than 0.5% of energy generation in Laos. But analysis of its 2020-2030 National Power Development Plan indicates that — while still relying heavily on hydropower — non-hydro renewables will eventually make up 5%. 

Cambodia

Cambodia has suffered from large-scale power shortages and blackouts. These stem from over-consumption issues and, less recently, drought-based hydropower lapses. According to a 2023 World Bank survey, as many as 43% of firms experienced electricity outages in Cambodia, as the country contends with meeting its short-term power needs. 

The kingdom does not yet have any major wind farms, but in May 2025, authorities approved six wind power projects in Mondulkiri Province that are expected to generate 900MW. Each developer has a 150MW allocation but there are few public details about construction timelines.

HK Oasis Power’s 150MW wind power station is currently the first of the six planned and is expected to begin operating in 2026. These wind projects should become a source of power during the country’s dry season, which usually runs from November to April. 

Another upcoming Mondulkiri wind farm is the 100MW Singaporean Blue Circle project. It will be built in conjunction with Cambodia’s Royal Group, which is also responsible for the controversial, 400MW Lower Sesan 2 hydropower plant.

These projects are a boon for Cambodia’s non-hydro renewable goals but the wind farms raise questions about impacts for wildlife habitats and local ways of life. Mondulkiri’s Indigenous Bunong residents have claimed some of the construction works could impact their lives and livelihoods. For example, one of the companies with project approval, SchneiTec Co, has been constructing a 299-kilometer power transmission line through Cambodia’s Prey Lang wildlife sanctuary.

Previous wind power projects in Cambodia hit permanent snags, such as a Blue Circle project in Kampot, which was set to begin construction on an 80MW wind farm in 2021. It was cancelled after failing to agree a per-kilowatt-hour tariff rate with the state-run energy supplier, Electricite du Cambodge. 

Authorities have stated that wind power will be integrated into the national grid by 2026. But despite these coming projects, Cambodia’s Power Development Plan up to 2040 will lead to only a marginal increase in wind power when compared to other sources, like solar. This is because Cambodia’s wind power potential is comparatively low for mainland Southeast Asia.

Despite issuing a 10-year moratorium on dam building on the Mekong mainstream in 2020, a majority of the renewable energy in Cambodia still comes from hydropower. The rest — just 10.5% — came from solar sources as of 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

Vietnam

Wind power is the largest source of non-hydro renewable energy in Vietnam, 80% of which was provided by 84 wind farms as of 2023. The country’s status as a regional leader in wind power has been largely attributed to a beneficial feed-in tariff system: the government pays guaranteed, above-average prices for renewable energy. The tariff, along with Vietnam’s government policy and strong potential for both on- and offshore wind energy generation, have attracted investors.

With an installed capacity of nearly 5GW as of 2024, Vietnam has made key changes to its Power Development Plan (PDP8), with a revised draft published in April outlining the country’s energy outlook to 2035. The original PDP8 of May 2023 had an ambitious outlook for onshore wind, including a goal of installing more than 21GW of onshore wind capacity by 2030. This has since been raised to 38GW. This is despite the revised PDP8 also outlining a large increase in expected solar energy, increasing the previous target by nearly six times to over 73GW.

But while Vietnam was an early and enthusiastic adopter of onshore wind power in mainland Southeast Asia, the country has been slow to adopt offshore wind. The original PDP8 planned for 6GW of offshore wind by 2030; this has been revised to 6-17GW by 2035.

Vietnam has signed several agreements for offshore wind projects, including a joint development between the state-owned PetroVietnam and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish renewable energy developer. The US$10.5 billion investment will supply 3.5GW of wind power. Another is the 1.4GW Phú Cường Sóc Trăng offshore wind farm, developed by the Irish company Mainstream Renewable Power.

In July, authorities said construction on the first project is “likely” to begin by the end of this year.

The Bạc Liêu offshore wind farm on the south coast of Vietnam. Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh via Alamy.

Recent studies show Vietnam has the potential to generate just over one terawatt of wind energy in its exclusive economic zone, nearly doubling previous World Bank estimates.

Nonetheless, Vietnam has struggled to generate investments for its renewable projects due to fears that its favorable energy tariffs will end. These policies have created a boom in Vietnam’s renewables sector but they have also created losses for the state-owned Vietnam Electricity (EVN), leading authorities to attempt to reduce them.

The revised PDP8 includes far-off goals for offshore wind projects. This is because, at current estimates, development elements such as permit issuance and construction planning is taking up to a decade.

As the country rapidly multiplies its wind power projects, concerns have been raised regarding the local socioeconomic costs of this. Vietnam’s many nearshore wind farms have faced criticism from fishers, whose incomes have been impacted by government-imposed fishing bans for wind farm perimeter zones.  

Both onshore and offshore wind farms also create risks to biodiversity. They could present problems for migratory birds, including endangered species from Siberia that migrate to Vietnam for winter, such as the Nordmann’s greenshank and spoon-billed sandpiper.

Myanmar

Myanmar, still embroiled in civil conflict at the time of writing, has had a number of wind power projects fall through. These include the high-profile, Chinese-built Chaung Tha project, which fell apart long before Myanmar’s military junta took control via the 2021 coup. 

The current administration is working with Russia to cultivate wind power. The Russian state-owned firm Rosatom, which also has nuclear energy ambitions in Myanmar, began working with a Myanmar developer on plans to build a 200MW wind farm near Mount Popa in 2023.

Despite the civil war in Myanmar and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the collaboration has seen movement in the past two years. Myanmar claims it is fast-tracking Mount Popa. The energy ministry has also signed a memorandum of understanding for eight wind-power projects across the country. Rosatom is behind three of them.

In 2023, Myanmar agreed to work with China on three wind power projects in Ann, Gwa and Thandwe, all in Rakhine state, for projects ranging from 100-150MW. However, reports in 2024 said the Ann and Thandwe projects had been taken over by the Rakhine people’s Arakan army.

Beyond its domestic wind power ambitions, Myanmar plays a key role in the development of regional wind power. It is a site for the illicit mining of heavy rare earth elements (HREEs). These are used to produce powerful permanent magnets in wind turbines that increase power generation and improve heat resistance, lowering the maintenance demands of larger — especially offshore — turbines.

A 2024 Global Witness report on HREEs states that firms involved in the creation of these magnets are reliant on Myanmar’s supply. Chinese interests are responsible for 85% of all rare earth processing, and China is the world’s number one consumer of HREEs. 

The unregulated and illicit mining of HREEs in Myanmar has led to high environmental and human costs. This is expected to continue. In addition to deadly mining incidents, chemicals used in the mining process such as oxalic acid have reportedly caused skin and respiratory damage, as well as deaths related to kidney failure.

The Global Witness report also highlights the use of in-situ leaching, a process by which ammonium sulfate is injected into pipes in the ground to circulate and extract rare earths. It says the toxins from these processes are flowing into streams where local people fish and collect drinking water. Nearby residents claim this chemical exposure is leading to deaths, the devastation of fish and other animal populations, and the report also notes that surrounding lands are becoming non-arable.

China backs the military junta. Its position as both participant and mediator in Myanmar’s conflict drastically affects global access to rare earth material. Almost half of the world’s accessible rare earth materials are mined in Kachin, Myanmar’s northernmost state. The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) took control of much of these resources in October 2024. The following May, China demanded the KIA stabilize the rare earth supply chain and threatened to stop buying HREEs from Myanmar.

This article was originally produced by Dialogue Earth and has been republished with permission. Read the original version here.

Everywhere I go in Vietnam, I keep my eyes peeled for the incredible birds that call this country home. Sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m doing it. I scan the horizon above low hills for migratory hawks. I stare into breaks in the foliage for passing buttonquail. I peer into rice paddies, fingers crossed for a cryptic snipe. And, of course, there’s Facebook. I refresh Facebook over and over again, waiting for the arrival of the mandarin duck. Its scientific name is Aix galericulata, which one assumes means “prettiest goddamn duck in the world.”

In actuality, “aix” is an Ancient Greek word first used by Aristotle to refer to an unknown diving bird while “galericulata” is the Latin for a wig, derived from galerum, a cap or bonnet. This is the kind of bird so utterly magnificent that you basically assume you’ll never see it. Mandarin ducks breed in the dense and isolated forests on the edge of rivers and lakes in far eastern Russia, China, and Hokkaido, Japan; the total number tallies up to just a few thousand pairs. During the winters they migrate southwards, fleeing the subarctic temperatures of their breeding grounds for the warmer swamps and flooded fields in central China. And every winter there is a single family group that decides to fly a little farther than the rest: about a thousand kilometers farther, to a hidden lake in northern Vietnam.

A family of Vietnam's next top avians.

Ba Bể is the largest natural lake in the country, and the heart of Ba Bể National Park. While only four hours from Hanoi by car, this treasure of the northern mountains is often skipped by Sa Pa trekkers and Hà Giang road trippers. But it is not ignored, thank goodness, by the Vietnamese birdwatching community. Steep limestone cliffs and primary forest all around the lakeshore make Ba Bể a hidden haven for birds, including the too-beautiful-to-be-allowed mandarin duck. My search for the duck during the migratory season begins online, where Vietnamese birdwatchers share their photos, tips and secrets.

Birdwatchers like Nguyễn Mạnh Hiệp, a senior official at the Vietnam Administration of Forestry, who keeps tabs on the ducks by staying in contact with national park rangers. There's also Nguyễn Thanh Sơn, an office worker and wildlife lover in Hanoi who, like me, relies on a network of bird and photography enthusiasts to let him know when incredible species like the mandarin duck are spotted. This winter, when the prodigal ducks returned, photos of them immediately began to pop up among this insular community of dedicated birders. Sơn decided one afternoon that he had to see them, and the next morning he was up at 3am to make his way north. I was on a business trip in Thailand when they appeared, and the moment I returned to Hanoi I was on my way, too, not wasting the hour it would have taken to go home and drop off my luggage.

Mandarin duck is the kind of bird so utterly magnificent that you basically assume you’ll never see it.

The passage into Ba Bể felt very much like entering another world — so much so that it’s worth saying this, despite the cliché. I joined my friend Bùi Đức Tiến, Vice President of the Vietnam Bird Conservation Society, and together we caught an early morning boat from town that coursed down a narrow river feeding the lake. We passed through an enormous limestone cave, coming out on the other end to the secluded sanctuary of Ba Bể. I was, of course, deeply anxious. We did not yet see the duck. It was far from certain that we would see the duck. I'm not sure I can describe how much I wanted to see the duck.

And then, there it was. It was Tiến, of course, who spotted it first: a single male, perched on a tree that overhangs the water. We cut the engine and coasted towards it. I lay on my stomach on the bow, steadying my camera and holding my breath. The duck, who has, in the past weeks, flown on little wings across a significant portion of the Asian continent, was totally relaxed. He was, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful birds on a planet so richly populated with beautiful birds. Purple, indigo and chestnut splayed from his body at odd angles, like ornate shavings of tinted glass. What a thing it is to behold.

Majestically leaping off the water.

The Vietnamese name for these ducks, chim uyên ương, can be literally translated as “love bird.” Vietnamese novelist and translator Nguyễn Hiền Trang points out that the name comes from the Chinese language: yuanyang (鸳鸯). In both Vietnam and in China, these ducks have a cultural significance dating back millennia. Mandarin ducks first started to show up in ancient Chinese poetry more than 1,500 years ago, appearing as symbols of both romantic and fraternal love. In Vietnam, terra cotta mandarin ducks decorated palace and pagoda towers during the Lý and Trần dynasties. The ducks even make a few appearances in the classic Vietnamese narrative poem 'Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc' once again as symbols of devotion and love.

Why symbols of love, you ask? The answer is in their duality. With ostentatiously colored males and much more modest females, the mandarin duck embodies the balance of yin and yang — gendered forms of the feminine earth below and the masculine firmament above. Perhaps owing to this legend, people across the ducks’ migratory route believe them to mate for life. But while lifelong monogamy isn’t unheard of in the world of birds, I regret to inform you that, in the case of these ducks, it is indeed a love story that’s too good to be true. Male mandarin ducks may be beautiful, but they are also carousing ruffians, hilariously unfaithful lovers, and absentee fathers.

Mandarin duck is one of the most beautiful bird species that can be spotted in Vietnam.

But that name, love birds, still rings true. One of the joys of birdwatching is escaping the self, and spending time appreciating an animal entirely on its own terms, and in its own world. Love birds may better describe the feelings that the mandarin ducks give us than it does their talent for monogamy. Judging by their prominent place in ancient Vietnamese culture, we can guess that there used to be a whole lot more of these ducks flying around than just this one family, at this one hidden lake. But with a growing number of Vietnamese people committed to protecting these creatures, we can hope that they will remain safe for generations to come. That’s what we could all use in times like these, I think. More birds. More love.

This article was originally published in 2023.

Why aren’t there any Vietnamese dinosaurs?

Well, Vietnam probably was home to dinosaurs; we just haven’t found their fossilized bones yet.

Scientists have uncovered fossilized remains of these beloved prehistoric animals in Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, but not Vietnam. In the last few decades, the Southeast Asian discoveries have included a great range of species representing many familiar groups, including Spinosaurus, Titanosaurus, and Iguanodon in their membership. Clustered around the middle period of dinosaurs’ 165-million-year reign, the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous species have greatly expanded our understanding of dinosaur variety and distribution.

Map of current ornithischian dinosaur finds in mainland Southeast Asia. Information adapted from this scientific paper. 

So why haven’t any been found in Vietnam yet? It all comes down to luck and money. Many of the region’s discoveries were the result of happenstance and activities unrelated to paleontological searches, including a chance sighting in a Northern Thai ignite mine and a bone exposed at low tide on the coast of a Cambodian island. The uncovering of these fossils frequently results in cross-national partnerships, most notably between Thailand and Japan, wherein foreign scientists provide knowledge and financial resources to further global understanding of dinosaurs.

Editor's note: Dinosaurs images adopted from Vietnam's released stamp collection and not illustrative of actual findings.

Unfortunately, there have been no such fortuitous findings in Vietnam, and without at least a clue for where to look, costly surveys are difficult to justify. The few expeditions to find dinosaurs over the years, led by mostly Hanoi-based geologists, have unfortunately come up empty-handed. The most recent search, a collaboration with Japanese paleontologists, explored Lạng Sơn and Sơn La and found fossiliferous rocks of the correct age, but no dinosaurs. So while geologists can confirm that dinosaur ecosystems existed in Vietnam based on rock formations, we are left waiting for further expeditions, a construction project or a sharp-eyed forest hiker to notice a unique rock that lures scientists. Experts suggest Quảng Bình is the most likely spot one will be identified.

Photo by Alberto Prieto.

Despite not yet having a dinosaur to call its own, Vietnam has shown an appreciation for these “terrible lizards (khủng long).” Several times since 1976, Vietnam has issued stamps featuring dinosaurs, maintains Tangvayosaurus material at the Hanoi Geological Museum, and a large dinosaur statue looms in front of the capital’s National Museum of Nature, revealing an understanding of how dinosaurs capture the public interest. One need only browse a toy store here to understand that Vietnamese children, like children everywhere, agree that dinosaurs are very cool. And this is why it matters that Vietnam finds one. If young people learned that there was a species with a Vietnamese name, found in a familiar province by people who speak their language, an appreciation for paleontology and science in general would surely increase. Future generations, at least a portion of them, might develop greater reverence for a natural world that thrived before people evolved, and hopefully will continue to do so long after us.

Why “Sticky Discovery”? This was the first question I asked during my interview with the man behind the YouTube series of nature documentaries. His name is Dính, given by his paternal grandmother because after Dính’s mother had two miscarriages, she’d hoped Dính (meaning “sticky” in English), would stay put.

Dính filming in An Giang.

Not common or conventionally beautiful, the name wasn't something Dính enjoyed having growing up. But over time, he came to appreciate it more, particularly as he saw the “sticky” qualities of topics that fascinated him: Dipterocarpaceae oleoresin and the collagen in crocodile bones, for example. He decided to name his YouTube page after it during one particularly fortuitous afternoon.

The whale Dính saw in Bình Định.

During a work trip to Bình Định, Dính learned that a whale had been observed in the nearby ocean. Against what seems like all possible chance, he thought he might be able to see it if he went out there. So he and a colleague arranged a boat to take them 30 minutes away from shore to where the whale had been last spotted. During the ride, Dính was thinking about the YouTube channel he was beginning to upload videos to. It needed a name. As land receded from view, the idea came to him out of the blue: Sticky Discovery. “Why not? My name is beautiful,” he thought. Sticky Discovery is thus both an acknowledgment of his coming to accept his own name, as well as an adjective that unites many of the topics he explores in his videos.

Growing up amongst butterflies, dragonflies and flowers

“To protect my beautiful childhood memories,” Dính said when I asked what motivates him to film and edit stories about Vietnamese nature.

Dính as a young child.

Born in Long Xuyên, An Giang, in 1995, Dính grew up beside a rural river surrounded by verdant delta flora. Simple strolls around town would bless him with interesting flowers, fruits, trees, and tiny critters to marvel at. But over the years, the idyllic natural area has been changing. A modern city has emerged, with gardens constrained, constricted, or destroyed to make way for construction and development. While Dính would share additional motivations for the Sticky Discovery videos later in our conversation, one important reason is to capture the natural areas that remain in Vietnam and remind him of the abundance he knew in his own backyard — the abundance that helped ignite a passion for nature in the first place.

A favorite photo from An Giang.

“I would usually go around my home, taking photos of butterflies, dragonflies, and flowers. And at that time, I watched BBC and NatGeo videos, and their behind-the-scenes, and wondered, ‘Wow! How can I get there? How can I do that?’ I asked my mother if I could study how to film nature or something like that. But, you know, at that time, it wasn’t available in Vietnam,” Dính reflected. Indeed, particularly 20 years ago, there was no clear path to take Dính from loving nature documentaries to actually making them.

Thus, with a dose of practicality and his mother’s concerns in mind, he enrolled at the University of Science in Hồ Chí Minh City after an older, former schoolmate returned to help with admissions and career counseling and handed out the school’s brochures. “I liked biology most because it involved most of the things that I love, but biotechnology involves technology, and technology is something maybe we can make money with,” he said. This wise assessment of the university’s degrees and the occupations they lead to, combined with some advice from a teacher, compelled Dính to enroll in biotechnology, though he didn’t quite follow the rules.

Dính in the Botanical Laboratory.

Dính has a hustler’s charm and wit, which allows him to finagle his way into conversations and opportunities that shouldn’t be available to him. For example, while studying the required biotechnology coursework in university, he would sneak into the biology classes, sometimes asking permission from the professors, sometimes not, and join field trips with the biology majors. For his thesis, Dính joined a biotechnology research group led by collaborating lecturers from biology and biotechnology. The project, “Evaluation of the Mosquito-Repellent Activity of Selected Essential Oils Combined with Plant-Based Carrier Oils,” enabled him to gain access to the biology major’s Botanical Laboratory — a place he had felt a deep pull towards and wished to be part of. That was the beginning of many field trips with biology lecturers and students.

Dính on a field trip in LangBiang. Photo by Tihon.

During his time in the botanical lab, Dính became friends with many of the students in that major, including Phan Thị Thanh Nhã, a botanist and botany artist and illustrator Saigoneer recently featured, through whom I met Dính. Since graduating, he has worked as a laboratory technologies salesman, providing equipment and reagents across various industries and now to hospitals and companies that use them for DNA tests, amongst other applications. He makes enough money to live and keep his mother from worrying too much while dedicating his free time to nature documentaries.

The power of happenstance and trusting one’s curiosity

Nhã introduced me to Dính at her booth in the Saigon Zoo during a botanical fair. I didn’t know it then, but they were selling postcards to raise money for a trip together. They planned to go to Huế to look for a fabled species of camellia flower. The dazzlingly bright red petals were described by French colonialists, but the plant’s current existence remains uncertain. “The color is very beautiful, but until now, nobody's seen it. I can only find the leaf and the sample that the French kept. I've not found the flower, but maybe I can see it out there somewhere. Maybe, maybe not, maybe it’s extinct already,” he said before noting that were he lucky enough to discover it, he wouldn’t post any announcement about it online before a clear protection plan was in place to safeguard it from the poachers who would seek to steal it.

Camellia bugiamapensis (left) and Camellia cattienensis (right).

When Dính and I initially spoke at the zoo, he introduced Sticky Discovery via the three-part piece on Cát Tiên’s crocodiles. Indeed, these are the videos that I now recommend to people checking out Sticky Discovery for the first time. They take viewers on a journey through the history of the species’ re-introduction to Bàu Sấu; how farms raising them for meat and leather have been crucial for their preservation; and how this led to a medicine developed from their bones that is helping Vietnamese children born with a rare genetic disorder. The videos even include a brief detour to an ancient archeological sight where the animals appear on the gold coins of a forgotten civilization in the highlands.

The crocodiles of Cát Tiên.

Dính never set out with this meandering story arc in mind when he started filming. Rather, he simply followed his curiosity after learning an anecdote about the crocodiles' reintroduction. He also wanted to push back against some YouTube comments left on an early video wherein people questioned why anyone would release a dangerous animal that could kill people. He wanted to correct this wrong mindset and allow visitors to Cát Tiên who see a crocodile to have a deeper understanding and respect for the true nature and value of the animals.

For the making of the crocodile videos, one question led to another, and a string of people agreed to meet with Dính, despite him not being able to offer any credentials or a real clear reason for the request. “If they are the right people, they will take time to meet with you. If not, they aren’t the right people,” he said. In explaining how he is usually able to convince scientists, researchers, experts and business people to sit for interviews, Dính referenced his belief in duyên, loosely translating to “faith met by opportunity,” which is the same concept that he credits for bringing him to the whale in Bình Định. I suspect that these professionals are like me and they are simply won over by Dính’s earnest enthusiasm for niche topics with no ulterior motives.

In addition to Dính’s knack for convincing people to share their knowledge with him, he has a talent for patience. He said that if a story requires four visits to a site, he’ll go four times; if it needs five, he’ll do five, and the same holds for however many interviews he needs to conduct. He is in no rush. “It’s just my hobby,” he said, “When I feel interested, I will feel happy with my trip, that’s how I enjoy my life. I see the story as my responsibility to tell everyone.”

Progressing slowly by design

“I want to do something like NatGeo or the BBC, but the Vietnamese version to talk about the diversity of Vietnam. If that works, then maybe later I’d do it in another country, but I’d love to do it for my country first,” Dính said of his long-term plans. He is working on a project about the diversity of camellia flowers at the moment, with one released about the topic already. He will also continue to post vlog-like videos and compilations of trips and years in review, which he said he makes for himself as a way to remember what he has seen and done; if others enjoy them, that's great too.

Since releasing the crocodile videos, Dính has heard from more people who are interested in making the same types of videos as he is and are on the same “frequency” when it comes to nature. Some of these people have found ways to fund their projects via grants and foreign institutions. Dính is inspired by these possibilities but isn’t in a hurry to monetize anything quite yet. “I’m still finding my way,” he said. “First, I need to understand myself and learn how to do everything on my own,” he said, noting that before he invites in any of the people who have expressed interest in collaborating with him, he wants to “go a little bit slow and find my way.”

Filming in An Giang.

So while he will sometimes travel with friends, simply enjoying their company on the journeys, for now, he considers the making of the videos to be a one-man operation. This includes the filming and editing process. He has taken some basic filmmaking and storytelling classes to improve the way he approaches the topics, but is happy to slowly learn via trial and error and not complicate the process by taking on additional people. Similarly, when he feels they are ready for more viewers he will expand the promotion of Sticky Discovery beyond his personal page and organic gathering of followers.

“I do not think about the audience before I post a video, I just want to share it, and if people like it, they like it. I’m trying to find a way to make scientific things easier to understand so people will realize that science is not something complicated, it's very simple and a part of everyday life,” he said when reflecting on the impact he hopes the videos have on his viewers.

In addition to making average people more aware and inspired by the nature that surrounds us all, he hopes his videos could influence important decision-makers when confronted with choices that impact nature. By seeing the practical and economic value of crocodiles, for example, they might eventually take actions that are in greater harmony with the natural world. “At the end of the day, I imagine that it's not a complicated scientific matter of ‘you have to do this, you have to do that.’ No, it’s just a little change in their mindset so their behavior is more friendly towards nature; so they can enjoy it and not destroy it.”

In Phú Quý.

While Dính will admit his videos are still a little rough around the edges as he learns his craft, they already hold immense power that should inspire us nature lovers who sometimes feel at a loss for how to share our enthusiasm for plants and animals in a way that makes an impact. Dính provides a great example. In one video, he explores Bến Tre, and the discussion of the myriad benefits of coconuts and the surrounding industry is interrupted by mudskippers in the canal. He deviates to simply express excitement over spotting the wondrous fish that shimmy up onto muddy land. The many problems facing the natural world will not be solved if more people were excited by nature, but it would certainly help. Here, Sticky Discovery is making a difference.

You first know she’s approaching by the sound of her wings; her broad shadow flashing across the forest floor. Even from far below, her body looks enormous. At half a meter long, she is roughly five times the size of the woodpeckers seen in the gardens of Europe or North America. She is the largest woodpecker left in the world, and the jewel of Yok Đôn National Park.

A great slaty woodpecker. Photo by Md Shahanshah Bappy

This April, I traveled to Đắk Lắk to search for the great slaty woodpecker (gõ kiến xám), a rarely seen species native to the dryer forests of Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, the best chance of spotting this magnificent bird is Yok Đôn National Park. Snug up against the Cambodian border, Yok Đôn offers over 1,000 square kilometers of broadleaved dipterocarp forest. It is the largest national park in Vietnam and was among the first to be founded. But despite its size, beauty and relative accessibility — the park is flat, walkable, and well-maintained — Yok Đôn sees few visitors. The main draw of the park is a population of domesticated Asiatic elephants, another charismatic gray giant.

Yok Đôn's towering dipterocarp trees. Photo by Thomas Mourez.

But we weren’t here for elephants. We were a small party of dedicated birdwatchers, led by Bùi Đức Tiến, vice-president of the Vietnam Bird Conservation Society and a contributor to the recently released Các Loài Chim Việt Nam (The Birds of Vietnam, Thế Giới Publishers). This is the definitive Vietnamese-language photographic guide to the over 800 species of bird that can be found in Vietnam, and it has no equal in English. Which is all to say that Tiến knows his stuff — he’s familiar with the various habitats of the park, and was reasonably sure that we could find one of these gray giants. Still, a birdwatcher knows better than to make promises. The great slaty woodpecker is a threatened species. Previous visitors to the park have come up empty-handed.

Left: Bùi Đức Tiến, vice-president of the Vietnam Bird Conservation Society, during the trip. Right: The road leading into the forest. Photos by Thomas Mourez.

The great slaty woodpecker is not the only giant to be pushed towards extinction by human activity. That caveat, “largest woodpecker left in the world,” is only because the larger ivory-billed and imperial woodpeckers of North America were recently considered to be certainly extinct, though back in the United States there remains a devoted cohort of unicorn-chasers who insist that the ivory-billed is alive, poring over pixelated photos that are roughly as compelling as evidence of bigfoot. For the time being, there is no question that a healthy population of great slaty woodpeckers remains in Yok Đôn. But given their listing in 2010 as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List, their future is not guaranteed.

Tiến explained that the greatest threats to the bird life of Yok Đôn come, predictably, from humans. Cattle grazing within the park boundary, as well as poaching and trapping for the caged bird trade all take their toll. Within minutes of entering the park, we saw evidence of this activity. Herds of cows wandered beneath the broadleaved trees, their bells the only sound in the silence. On our second day, we encountered and destroyed a large mist net, over two meters high and four meters across, meant to snare birds as they passed through. But the bird life in the park remains abundant. We saw 111 species in just four days, 11 of those being different kinds of woodpecker, with gõ kiến xám taking the place of honor atop our list.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of spotting a rare and beautiful bird in the wild. Imagine four people hooting and leaping while trying to make as little noise as possible. Our first of two sightings happened suddenly, a bird bursting across treetops and flying directly over our heads. Its silhouette is that of a pterodactyl — thin neck and oversized head, great dipping wingbeats. The woodpecker landed on an exposed patch of tree trunk just long enough for a few passable photographs, and after that abundant courtesy, it was gone.

Gõ kiến xám seen from a distance. Photo by Thomas Mourez.

We are not alone in this passion, us four lunatics all celebrating as though we’d each just scored the winning goal in a World Cup match. According to the Center for Responsible Travel, birdwatching is a multi-billion dollar industry, with over 3 million international trips taken every year with the primary purpose of birdwatching. As a safe country with outstanding bird diversity, Vietnam stands to benefit from a boom in low-impact, high-spend birdwatchers. Indeed, Tiến sees forest preservation and anti-poaching efforts as working hand-in-hand with efforts to increase domestic interest in Vietnam’s amazing birdlife, and improving accommodations and other tourist infrastructure.

A pair of black-headed woodpeckers (gõ kiến xanh hông đỏ) seen during the trip. Photo by Alexander Yates.

Until that boom comes, gõ kiến xám remains in the forests of Yok Đôn, raising chicks on meals of fat termites. Anyone looking to see them, or the many other stunning falcons, parakeets, owls and woodpeckers that inhabit Yok Đôn, need only step into the woods, look up, and hope.

This article was originally published in 2022.

What is your favorite sound?

We don’t ask each other this enough. Favorite food, color, movie, sure, but sound? I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that. And my answer is easy: a gibbon call.

Video of the southern yellow-cheeked gibbon (vượn đen má vàng Nam)'s morning call in Cát Tiên National Park. Video via Ryan Campbell.

A series of resonant whoops accelerating to reverberating chirps, answered by staccato yips and howls fills Vietnam’s jungles at dawn. It sounds as if the gibbons have poured molten indigo into the forest’s every leafy gear and fusebox. The so-called “great call” of a yellow-cheeked gibbon and the enthusiastic duet response of her male life partner is simply one of the most astounding noises in the animal kingdom. 

When the sun begins to peer through the mist hanging in the towering tung trees, the calls stampede above the forest. Each gibbon pair begins their day by announcing their territory with duets that serve to simultaneously strengthen their bonds. The songs plunge listeners into the realization that they are fully and completely in a complex and beautiful natural world that exists beyond the petty concerns of humanity. 

A male (left) and female (right) southern white-cheeked gibbon. Photo via iNaturalistUK.

I gained a greater appreciation for the gibbon calls earlier this month during a trip to Cát Tiên National Park, when I could hear the songs in their natural environment, amidst the totality of the rich and interconnected rainforest ecosystem where endangered Bengal monitors stalk the leafy undergrowth, and rosewood trees rise in defiance of furniture manufacturers. If the forest could offer a single song to express its fragile vibrancy, it would be the gibbon’s morning call. 

That recent trip wasn't when I first came to love the gibbon call, however. When I lived overlooking the Saigon Zoo, I heard the resident gibbons sing every morning. Particularly during the COVID-19 period, when the noises would shatter the aching silence of the city, they seemed to manifest loneliness and anxiety, much like how the great Chinese poets Li Bai and Du Fu used the calls to conjure isolation and melancholy. 

My appreciation for the calls goes back decades before that, however. Before embarking on my university studies, I spent a summer taking a course in ethology at the University of Chicago. I was tasked with observing gibbons in the zoo for several hours a day, noting their every behavior, including their morning calls and separate calls of warning and alert. The exercise proved essential for teaching me that I didn’t want to embark down a path of science that dissected with painstaking record, keeping the intricacies of the natural world in clinically quantifiable terms. I preferred to let it wash over me in a deluge of unknowable, quasi-religious awe. It’s not much exaggeration to say I have the gibbon call to thank for inspiring me to become a writer and not a scientist.

I’m not unique, though, and I think we all could learn something from listening to the gibbon call, particularly when it essentially translates to “good morning - leave us alone in our corner of the forest.”

When science and art commingle in a botanical illustration, it’s as if a magical world appears, where colors, brushstrokes, and lighting work together to not only replicate but also breathe life into nature’s best creations.

Phan Thị Thanh Nhã is a botanist by trade, working as a teaching assistant at the Botany Lab of the Faculty of Biology-Biotechnology at the University of Science, HCMC Vietnam National University. Interestingly, she is also the author behind all the illustrations in her botanical research.

Phan Thị Thanh Nhã at the exhibition “Fields of Optics | Chapter I: Biocenosis”

Nhã embarked on her journey with botanical illustration, a relatively new and challenging field in Vietnam, thanks to previous works by Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, including two iconic books Cây cỏ Việt Nam (The Flora of Vietnam) and Hiển hoa bí tử (Flowering Plants). She was the first artist in the field from Vietnam whose art pieces were featured internationally, at the “Flora of Southeast Asia” exhibition in September 2022. The success of the event helped consolidate Nhã’s faith in her craft, making her realize that there’s a space in botanical illustration for young enthusiasts like her, as long as they approach it seriously and with an open mind.

Rhynchospora corymbosa (L.) Britton | Chủy tử tản phòng | Golden beaksedge

Into the world of native flora

Nhã is pursuing different forms of scientific illustration, but her focus is on botanical illustration and botanical art. The former places emphasis on scientific utility and perspective; the latter, while still scientifically accurate, can concentrate on aesthetic appeal instead.

A botanical illustration is a faithful depiction of a species, often used in scientific documents, textbooks, and research publications. Artworks in this genre require a high level of accuracy when it comes to detailing every part of the plant. These visual portrayals, alongside in-depth description texts, will provide readers with a comprehensive profile about the species in question.

‎Garcinia phuongmaiensis V.S.Dang, H.Toyama & D.L.A.Tuan | Bứa Phương Mai | Exhibition: “Margaret Flockton Award 2023”

Botanical art, on the other hand, aims to blend the precision of botany with the emotional appeal of visual art. It’s still rooted in scientific specifications, but instead of showing every part and life stage of the plant, the artist can choose to zoom in on a leaf or a flower. As long as the work is botanically accurate, the author is free to experiment with composition, lighting, or even emotional narrative to help the species stand out.

Camellia honbaensis Luu, Q.D.Nguyen & G.Tran | Trà mi Hòn Bà.

“Each species has its own scientific name in Latin,” she explained. Before starting any illustration, Nhã must seek out its scientific name and read all related documents, such as the plant’s medicinal properties, natural distribution, and usage. In learning comprehensively about the species, she arrives at the most complete picture to start sketching.

The final work is a team effort

Once an initial sketch is done, she will send it to the leading experts of each plant family or order to get their feedback, and discuss with them how to adjust the illustration.

Camellia yokdonensis Dung bis & Hakoda | Trà mi Yok Đôn.

“For instance, when I was creating a piece on the Yok Đôn camellia flower, the researchers suggested I modify the flower to face upwards, and informed me about its two color variants: vibrant orange and gentle pink,” Nhã recalled. “After our discussion, they recommended I depict the pink variant to appeal to viewers’ taste, so they could feel connected to it and maybe will seek it out to plant at home.”

Still, accuracy is a high priority for her artworks, as each fold and vein of the leaves must be replicated correctly. The experts not only weigh in to help correct the sketch but also provide her with ample references on the plant’s visual appearance, medicinal use, and biological attributes so she could best bring the plant to life on paper.

Calophyllum inophyllum L. | Mù u.

Picking the right medium for the illustrations is also a crucial step. Each plant species carries with it a distinctive elegance, angularity or movement, so the material to execute their portrayal should also fit those characteristics. Colored pencils and watercolor are most commonly used to depict flowers. Rhizomes like ginger relatives tend to be sharper, so she usually picks acrylic. Besides, silk painting is another possible choice for botanical illustrations.

A piece of botanical illustration is often highly valuable, not just due to material costs, but also because of the effort and time spent completing it. The creative part does require a high level of focus, but to Nhã, the most challenging step involves getting feedback from the experts and then modifying each small detail based on the comments so that the plant appears most accurately. Some illustrations, because of that, might take years to finish.

Loving means understanding

It’s Nhã’s hope to transform seemingly complicated science into something approachable to everyone, so they can better understand the flowers, trees and fruits of their nation. She believes that only by really understanding something can we grow to love it; and once we love it, we’ll spend efforts to preserve and protect it, and to cultivate it in order to prolong its existence on Earth. One of the methods of plant conservation that she tries to promote is ex situ conservation — protecting species outside of their natural habitat.

Inside the “Scent Station” workshop.

Nhã has been doing her part to connect and expand the community of plant aficionados through many initiatives, from organizing workshops to hands-on programs to give people a chance to get to know Vietnam’s amazing botanical diversity.

Starting from October 2023, Nhã commenced a series of events providing multi-sensory experiences revolving around botanical illustration, including “Botanical Art: Ways of Seeing” (visual), “Botanical Art: Scent Station” (olfactory), and “From Palette to Palate” (gustatory), and tactile experiences via a collaboration with a fashion organization in Saigon.

Common household spices of Vietnam as seen in Scent Station.

During the olfactory workshop, Nhã presented a collection of essential oils and introduced oil extraction methods while providing cautions on how to use them to guests. Various nuggets of specialized knowledge from fields like organic chemistry and plant anatomy were peppered throughout the event in accessible and educational ways. Participants had an opportunity to explore the oils with four senses: observing the physical state of the oils and viewing illustrations of the plants that produce them, listening to the background information, feeling the sensations of some skin-safe oils like mù u, passion fruit, and sachi on their hands, and smelling them.

In 2024, she also organized events focusing on sketching and exploring the plant world with children, students, and senior participants. To join, one does not need to know how to draw or have any botany knowledge, because Nhã believes that anyone can pick up a pencil to draw and get closer to the universe of botanical illustration.

Each artwork reflects the soul

The time spent working closely with plants is when Nhã feels the most connected to nature in a wholesome way. It’s not simply replicating the silhouettes of a leaf or a petal, but embodying their truest soul on paper via an in-depth understanding.

Neptunia oleracea Lour. | Rau nhút.

Spending time with plants is also a journey of self-discovery. The illustrator can hone their fingers’ nimbleness and sharpen their observational skills, but most importantly, learn how to listen to their body. With every brushstroke, they could reduce stress, be in tune with the rhythm of their breaths, practice mindfulness, and marvel at the beauty of nature.

The world of plants is expansive where each leaf, each cell is constantly living. Through her work in botanical illustration, Nhã has a front seat to witness those pulses of life while unearthing the eclectic natural treasures in the familiar world around her.

“It’s been so long I can barely remember. It’s delicious, fragrant, soft but not sticky,” says Trần Văn Lựa, 53, a farmer from Đồng Tháp Province, south-west Vietnam, recalling the taste of wild rice. As a child, he would harvest the grain during flood season, when wild rice flowers. Today, however, it is a rare sight.

Wild rice, known locally as “ghost rice” (lúa ma), is the common name for Oryza rufipogon, a perennial native to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and the ancestor of modern Asian rice (Oryza sativa). It carries genes that confer resistance to pests like rice leaf folder moths, stem-boring insects and viral diseases like rice grassy stunt and ragged stunt — traits lost in modern varieties. Its high genetic diversity is a rich resource for scientists to develop new genes that are adaptive to drought, flooding, heat and acidic soils.

As climate pressures mount, these qualities are proving more important than ever. Yet Vietnam, one of the species’ last global refuges, is struggling to preserve it.

A lifeline during flood season

In the 1970s, wild rice was a lifeline during wartime and food shortages. It thrived in the floodplains of the Đồng Tháp Mười region, where seasonal inundation submerged fields for months. A sack of wild rice, locals say, would fetch three times the price of regular rice.

Once abundant, it has since become a rarity, often mistaken for “weedy rice” (Oryza spontanea), an aggressive weed that produces fewer grains, which shed early, causing mass crop failures. The perception of wild rice as a weed has persisted even among international scientific circles, with the North American Plant Protection Organization and several US states classifying it as such.

Vietnam is home to four of the world’s wild rice species: Oryza rufipogon, Oryza nivara, Oryza officinalis and Oryza granulata. Only rufipogon and officinalis are still found in the Mekong Delta; nivara was last seen in the Delta’s Tràm Chim National Park in 1980, and is now still present in Hồ Lắk, a lake in central Đắk Lắk Province.

A rare cluster of Oryza rufipogon, or “ghost” rice, in Tràm Chim National Park, Vietnam. Once abundant and a crucial food source during shortages, it has since become a rarity, often mistaken for “weedy rice.” Photo by Nam Phong/Mekong Eye.

Bùi Chí Bửu is the former director of the Institute of Agricultural Science for Southern Vietnam and one of the few Vietnamese scientists studying wild rice. He says its remarkable genetic diversity makes it ideal for breeding climate-resilient rice.

Wild rice grows low across wetland plains and can survive months of inundation. Its seeds can lie dormant for years, germinating only when conditions align.

Harvesting it requires precision: wild rice sheds grains at the slightest breeze, so farmers often go out on their boats before dawn — when winds are calm — spreading blankets across their boats and tapping the stalks with bamboo poles to catch the falling grains.

This ghostly shedding is what earned it the name lúa ma, meaning “ghost rice.”

It is valued for its genes. “Wild rice possesses a highly diverse genetic foundation,” Bửu says. “The species contains rare genes that cultivated and native rice varieties have lost over the evolutionary pathway.” These include alleles — specific gene variants — that were largely lost during the domestication of rice and modern breeding efforts, which narrowed the gene pool by selecting only for traits like high yield or uniformity. Many of these lost genes are now recognized as critical for tolerance to climate stress and toxic metals in acidic soils.

Bùi Chí Bửu, one of the few Vietnamese scientists studying wild rice, tends to Oryza officinalis in his garden in Cần Thơ. He says that the species contains rare genes that cultivated and native rice varieties have lost over the evolutionary pathway. Photo by Nam Phong/Mekong Eye.

Research by Bửu’s team found that while cultivated rice in Vietnam has a low genetic diversity index (0.2), wild rice in the Mekong Delta ranges from 0.4 to 0.6, sometimes higher. “For a country with weak genetic diversity [of rice] like Vietnam, preserving species with rich genetic foundations is essential,” he says.

Meanwhile, despite resembling cultivated rice, weedy rice is genetically unstable due to crossbreeding with genetically dissimilar strains. It sheds all its grains at maturity, causing up to 60% crop loss, and spreads rapidly. Its similarity to farmed rice renders it resistant to herbicides, making it especially difficult to control.

Tracking a vanishing gene bank

In his home garden in Cần Thơ, Bửu tends to several wild rice species collected from across southern Vietnam.

Wild rice is remarkably resilient, but not invincible. To keep them alive, he must propagate the plants every few years. “Even as a perennial, if left alone, they will exhaust themselves and die,” he explains.

On-farm breeding — where plants are cultivated and selected in open fields rather than labs — is a low-cost method used in Vietnam and parts of Africa, but it comes with risks. Plants are vulnerable to cross-pollination and small gene pools can collapse with a single failed generation.

A more secure backup lies at the Mekong Delta Rice Research Institute (MDRRI), also in Cần Thơ, where hundreds of pots of wild rice are maintained alongside a small seed bank. The institute stores 600 samples of Oryza rufipogon and Oryza officinalis in cold storage and net houses — screened structures that regulate sunlight and pest exposure. To preserve viability, seeds are periodically revived, grown and re-stored to prevent the gradual loss of germination.

In the net house of the Mekong Delta Rice Research Institute, hundreds of pots of wild rice are cultivated. Photo by Nam Phong/Mekong Eye.

Two wild rice varieties, Oryza officinalis and Oryza rufipogon, are currently stored in the gene bank of the Mekong Delta Rice Research Institute, but funding has become a problem. Photo by Nam Phong/Mekong Eye.

However, institutional seed banks face funding challenges.

“In the past, funding for our gene bank came entirely from the Plant Resources Center, which supported cold storage and seed rejuvenation,” says Trần Ngọc Thạch, the institute’s director. “But now, we fund the cold storage ourselves, so preservation is less than ideal.”

There are two main strategies for conserving wild rice: ex-situ, through storage in seed banks, and in-situ, conserving the plants in their natural habitats. While gene banks safeguard genetic material, they halt natural evolution. In-situ conservation, on the other hand, allows species to continue adapting to changing conditions.

Elsewhere, wild rice remains a low priority. The Indigenous Rice Gene Bank at Cần Thơ University is among the few better-funded preservation facilities in the country, with around 5,000 samples. But its focus is on seasonal, lowland and rain-fed varieties from the Mekong Delta — none of them wild.

“Wild rice seeds require special regeneration conditions, which we are not prioritizing due to limited funding and manpower,” says Nguyễn Thành Tâm, head of agricultural development at the MDRRI. 

In-situ conservation is widely regarded as the best way to protect and evolve the species. But it, too, is under pressure: farmers prefer high-yield hybrids, and wetland habitats are shrinking or degraded.

Tràm Chim National Park, in Đồng Tháp province near Vietnam’s border with Cambodia, is the country’s largest in-situ wild rice conservation site and has drawn international interest for its biodiversity. The park, along with the larger province, is home to Oryza rufipogon populations with the highest recorded genetic diversity in the Mekong Delta.

Before 2015, Tràm Chim’s wild rice fields covered nearly 1,000 hectares, thriving alongside wetland species like Eleocharis dulcis (water chestnut or năn ống), Eleocharis atropurpurea (purple spikerush or năn kim) and several types of native grasses.

Ghost rice growing on a canal bank in Tràm Chim National Park, near Vietnam’s border with Cambodia, where it used to thrive alongside other wetland species. Photo by Nam Phong/Mekong Eye.

Today, park officials estimate only 520 hectares remain, half the area seen a decade ago. Pure wild rice fields, which totalled just 33 hectares in 2015, have continued to shrink. “Wild rice is now scattered across many areas rather than concentrated in one place,” says Đoàn Văn Nhanh, deputy director of the park’s Center for Conservation and International Cooperation.

Cruising through Tràm Chim’s waterways in early January, the usual blooming season for wild rice, there was little sign of the plant — only stretches of water chestnut. A few clumps of wild rice clung to levees.

Each year, wild rice sprouts tall as Mekong floodwaters rise, flowering at peak inundation, but patterns are changing. “It seems that this year, the flood surged and retreated unusually fast, leaving barely any wild rice,” says Trần Văn Lựa, a local farmer.

Nhanh agrees. He believes erratic floods have disrupted the plant’s natural cycle. Roaming cattle, often released into the park, graze on what little remains.

Rebuilding a habitat

Covering just over 7,300 hectares, the national park shelters 130 plant species, 130 freshwater fish and 231 bird species — many of them endemic. But years of mismanaged hydrology have disrupted this delicate balance. A 10-year restoration project, backed by over VND184 billion (US$7 million) from the Đồng Tháp Provincial People’s Committee, is now underway. The Sarus Crane Conservation and Development Project combines ecological restoration, captive breeding and organic agriculture to restore crane populations and protect the park’s biodiversity.

A flock of sarus crane in Tràm Chim National Park. The endangered species uses ghost rice fields as feeding and resting grounds and are now a rare sight in the area. Photo by Tang A Pau.

“At Tràm Chim, we are restoring and rehabilitating the ecosystems, with a focus on Eleocharis atropurpurea [purple spikerush], the main food source for cranes,” says Nhanh. The cranes are an indicator of wetland health, he adds.

To prevent forest fires, park managers introduced canals and levees to maintain higher water levels year-round, altering the natural six-month cycle. Wild rice, unable to regenerate without dry periods and decomposed surface nutrients, began disappearing, including from its former stronghold on the park’s eastern side.

Wild rice plays a critical ecological role in the Delta. Its roots, stems, leaves and seeds are a major food source for birds and fish during stressful periods like deep flooding or drought, explains Dương Văn Ni, a biodiversity expert at Cần Thơ University. When wild rice disappears, the food chain unravels. Species that depend on it decline and eventually vanish.

“Water flow into the Mekong Delta no longer follows its usual patterns,” says Nhanh. “With unpredictable climate and hydrological factors, we must remain flexible in how we manage the park to avoid significant losses.” Water levels, he adds, are now adjusted in response to shifting rainfall patterns.

Efforts to reverse the damage are underway. Controlled burning of grasslands was reintroduced and park staff are restoring native grasses critical to crane habitats, alongside wild rice. A five-hectare pilot plot of wild rice has shown tentative signs of recovery. A new ecological rice farming initiative, dubbed “Rice calls the cranes back,” has also been launched to align organic cultivation with habitat restoration. The broad goal is to convert 200 hectares to this model by 2028.

But as Mekong flood patterns grow more erratic — driven by climate change and upstream hydropower — the long-term outlook of species like wild rice remains uncertain. Their loss would not only threaten local biodiversity, but erase genetic resources for climate-resilient agriculture across the region.

“Each species has its own adaptation limits, and wild rice is no exception,” says Dương. “Maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem, therefore, creates the best conditions for many species. Ongoing, updated research will be essential to sustain the ecosystem as a living being.”

This article was co-published in English by Mekong Eye and Dialogue Earth and was republished on Saigoneer with permission. Visit the original article here.