Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
We are four environmental journalists who have, for various reasons, found ourselves working in regions outside our home continent. We will be sharing personal reflections on the fight against climate change, highlighting key science and policy developments, and sharing some of the best local and international environmental journalism from the regions where we live – namely Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and South Asia.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
From Hong Kong to the Mekong and back
Letter no.10 by India Bourke, Hong Kong
In January, the streets of Hong Kong were awash with fish: Red paper fish hanging in shop windows; sparkling plastic fish adorning airport displays; golden fish blazing in neon lights from the sides of sky-scrapers.
Fish are a symbol of abundance in Chinese culture, and over the Lunar New Year - regardless of the changing zodiac animal - they swim their way into blessings of prosperity and luck. “May you have fish every year” is pronounced the same as “may you have extra every year”.
But fish also evoke notions of flow and movement, and this year’s outbreak of the deadly Novel Coronavirus meant that the festivities also brought a heavy new awareness of the risks of interconnection -- and the pain that follows when the vast flow of humanity is suddenly damned up.
As the contagion’s grim story has unfolded, the world’s media cycle has latched on fast, entranced perhaps by its dizzying speed. Political attempts to halt its spread have closed borders and sent millions into self-quarantine; the global economy feels like it is teetering on an edge.
And in ways like these, the response has thrown into relief the principle that environmentalists know all too well: that individual life both thrives and dies by the wider webs of which we’re part -- that, regardless of the virus’s fate, there are other, older forms of disrupted flow that continue to wreak destruction.
Cambodia's disappearing fish
In Cambodia, the communist government has made a notable show of solidarity with virus-hit China in recent weeks, accepting stranded cruise-ship passengers shunned by other countries. But the close ties with their super-power neighbour are very much a double-edged knife.
For years, hydropower dams on the Mekong rivers’ Chinese headwaters have been sucking vital, life-giving sediment out of the water, depleting it’s capacity to hold fish. Then last October, the first of many planned new lower-river dams was also opened in Laos with devastating effect.
When I visited the Tonle Sap river in Cambodia during December’s high-fishing season, my guide, a 42-year-old former-farmer named Hoeum, recalled how plentiful the river, an offshoot of the Mekong, used to be in his youth.
As a 10 year old, he would catch an array of Indian carp, walking catfish, poach and silver barb straight from the flood waters with small nets or the lure of frogs on a hand-held line.
Back then, even prized giant catfish were not uncommon. But now, fish that were once the width of his wrist are now only “about the size of toes or fingers”.
Over-fishing is part of the problem, Hoeum, who studied sustainable agriculture through an NGO called CEDAC, explained — as is the increased use of pesticides on the riverbank farms, pollution, littering and sand dredging, as well as the threat from foreign exotic plants like water hycathins and giant mimosa. But it is the dams that form the problem’s bedrock.
Hoeum is doing what he can by starting his own organic farm, complete with 400 green-orange trees.
Yet about the wider situation he still feels despair. Fish is the country’s main source of protein, providing about 2-3 of the daily meals — either cooked fresh or eaten smoked, dried or fermented — and its continued loss could have disastrous effects: “The fish dramatically declines each year so there will be less food in future.”
The view from Hong Kong
Life on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap could not have been more different from the hectic, high-tech streets I’m used to.
Each morning, as dawn broke, small teams set off in narrow boats to check the finely webbed nets they’d laid in the downstream flow; pulling them forward till the teeming fish could be hauled inside.
In the evening, wives and mothers back at the riverside villages threaded the small silvery carp onto metal frames for smoking over a charcoal fire — while boy-racers speeded home through the river’s growing dark, their on-board motors at full-thrust.
Two months later, these scenes in some ways feel a world away from Hong Kong’s rich, high-rise (and now universally face-masked) urban bustle.
But in other respects, I can’t help but feel there is a common thread running between these two places too … one which warns that when flow is stopped — be it of water, fish, or trade in the face of a deadly new virus — humans communities choke.
Must reads from the region
Damming the lower Mekong, Hannah Beech, New York Times “Maybe our way of life on the river is finished.”
How the scramble for sand is destroying the Mekong, BBC, Beth Timmins Dam building is not the only calamity facing the life sustaining waterway; sand-dredging is also wreaking ecological havoc amid a murky absence of transparency.
Thailand ditches China led plan to dredge Mekong river, AFP In a surprise sign that the Mekong’s fortunes may yet change for the better, Thailand has denied China permission to blast a 97km route for cargo ships through its northern riverbed, citing environmental concerns
Is Coronavirus infecting everything in the energy sector, Axios, Ben Geman The links between the virus and climate change are yet to be fully unravelled, but early indicators suggest that even as China’s enforced slowdown lowers both its emissions and fossil fuel demand, it is also impeding production of solar panels and electric cars.
What else I've been reading...
One film that missed out on an Oscar nomination but is worth catching anyway if you’re interested in things anime and climate-related is Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You. Set in Tokyo’s flooded streets, its scenes of urban deluge felt both timelessly lyrical and urgently timely. And though I had strong reservations about its emphasis on individual rather than collective solutions (as with its jarringly heavy McDonalds product-placement), its vision of a mega-city’s continuing connection to nature is sublimely lovely.