The San Francisco-based Asia Foundation has bestowed its Leader on the Frontlines Award to a Thai conservationist who has mobilized Mekong River communities to protect the environment and oppose dam building on the most vital waterway in the region.

Niwat Roykaew is the first Thai to receive the Leader on the Frontlines Award. The 64-year-old activist, is the Chair of the Chiang Khong Conservation Group and Director of the
Mekong School’s Institute of Local Knowledge.

The Asia Foundation said that he led and mobilized communities and succeeded in halting destructive blasting and dam projects that threatened the river and its communities. “I’d like to use this opportunity to spread information and encourage people to be interested in environmental resource protection as this practice does not only belong to one country,” Niwat said during the ceremony in San Francisco.

Indeed. The Mekong originates in the Tibetan plateau and winds its way through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam before spilling into the South China Sea. The river is crucial to the food security and livelihoods of millions of people along its path. It provides a bounty of fish, and its waters irrigate millions of acres of farmland.

But in recent years, water levels have been falling, with many people blaming dams built upriver by China and Laos, both of which are tapping the river for hydropower.  Fears have arisen among countries that the river may be dying. Nonetheless, thanks to efforts by people such as Niwat the tide may be turning.

The Yale360 website wrote earlier this year that “After years of environmental assault — from dam building, overfishing, and logging — stretches of the Mekong River, upon which millions of people depend, appear to be recovering. Heavy rains have helped, along with a crackdown on illegal fishing and other conservation efforts.”

“The Mekong is not dead,” Sudeep Chandra, director of the Global Water Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, who leads the USAID-funded Wonders of the Mekong research project told Yale360. “We’ve seen huge environmental pressures causing the Mekong to dry up and fisheries to almost collapse. And yet we also see the incredible resilience of this river in the face of those threats.”

Photo courtesy of https://www.internationalrivers.org/