The issue of overfishing is the greatest threat to ocean ecosystems today. Overfishing occurs where fish are netted at a more rapid rate than they can reproduce. Some reasons that have led to overfishing are advanced fishing technologies, increased demand for fish and illegal fishing.

The Royal Thai customs have seized 12.5 kilograms of rhino horn from South Africa in December, leading to the arrest of a key figure in Southeast Asia’s illicit wildlife trade.With the help of Elephant Action League (EAL), a non-profit organization based in US that investigates wildlife crime, Royal Thai authorities managed to arrest wildlife traffickers from the Bach Family Syndicate in Thailand.Through the seizure last month, Royal Thai Customs arrested a Chinese mule and a Thai national.

Just like the Nile in Egypt and the Yangtze in China, the Mekong river plays just as big a role in the Southeast Asian region unifying six different countries throughout. It is also no surprise that the region is experiencing rapid economic growth and one main reason is due to the Mekong river itself.

The Indonesian government is confident it can halve the number of forest fires in the country by 2019 after unveiling an ambitious plan recently.

Despite his son’s defeat in the 2013 election, Darwan’s family remained embedded in the political establishment in both Seruyan and Central Kalimantan province. Darwan moved to a new political party, which he now chairs at the provincial level. It is an influential position for trading support in elections.

To the handful of observers who were aware of what Darwan had done, it was clear that he had abused his office to make money for his family, while inflicting considerable harm on the people he was elected to serve. The KPK investigators circled around the case for years, so why didn’t they pounce?The investigators involved, who have all since left the agency, were either unwilling or unable to comment for this article.

One night during Darwan’s second term, a farmer named Marjuansyah, who lived in the village the bupati had grown up in, had an unsettling encounter with the police. For two years he had nursed a small patch of oil palm east of Lake Sembuluh, and hundreds of saplings were now close to bearing fruit. But his land also fell within an area licensed to one of the companies Darwan’s son Ruswandi had sold to Triputra. The police told Marjuansyah that they had come on company business.

Bali's palm-fringed Kuta beach has long been a favourite with tourists seeking sun and surf, but nowadays its golden shoreline is disappearing under a mountain of garbage.Plastic straws and food packaging are strewn between sunbathers, while surfers bobbing behind the waves dodge waste flushed out from rivers or brought in by swirling currents."When I want to swim, it is not really nice.

The South China Sea has been long threatened – geographically and politically. In more recent times, ecologically too.The South China Sea is one of the world’s top five most productive fishing zones, accounting for about 12 percent of global fish catch in 2015 alone.More than half of the fishing vessels in the world operate in these waters, which employs 3.7 million people, and likely many more engaged in illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing.

The sequence of events after the shell companies were formed tells us two things. Firstly, that the intent was never for the founders to develop the plantations themselves. Between December 2004 and May 2005, Darwan gave 16 of the companies permits for plantations. By the end of 2005, at least nine of them had been sold on to major palm oil firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars.