2024 was a year marked by a COP climate summit so dismal that many governments and analysts questioned whether the annual meetings are even worth holding. While world leaders failed to secure meaningful action, extreme weather events battered Southeast Asia, underscoring the deadly consequences of inaction on climate change and the urgent need for inclusive solutions.

An early summer heat wave that climate scientists said would have been “impossible” without the climate crisis saw temperatures soar across the region. Amid the deadly and unprecedented temperatures, farmers faced water shortages and ruined fruit and rice harvests. The onset of the wet season brought no respite, with intensified typhoons and flash floods taking a devastating toll on northern Vietnam, the Philippines and parts of Thailand. The storms left urban centers and farmland in tatters, displacing people, devastating crops and triggering deadly landslides.

Carbon market calamities

One mechanism aimed at countering global emissions to reduce to the likelihood and severity of these climatic tumults is the carbon market. However, the sale of carbon credits to offset fossil fuel emissions and reduce deforestation has come under increased scrutiny in Southeast Asia. The region is home to a significant portion of the world’s tropical forests, and carbon industry players reported that REDD+ projects here could generate up to $27.7 billion by 2050, with Southeast Asia’s broader carbon market touted as being capable of reaching nearly $3 trillion in the coming 25 years — provided the right policies are in place.

But with such vast sums of money at stake, questions are now being asked about the efficacy of REDD+ projects as scandals have emerged, alleging gross human rights abuses among some of Southeast Asia’s largest carbon-offsetting projects.

Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project was reinstated by carbon broker agency Verra in September 2024 after the sale of carbon credits from the project were suspended in June 2023.

Verra suspended the project after a Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that project developer Wildlife Alliance had failed to secure the free, prior and informed consent of local communities, who in turn claimed to have lost land and income as a result, as well as recounting often violent interactions with rangers working on the REDD+ project. Wildlife Alliance has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

Land rights issues have embroiled REDD+ projects across Cambodia, with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Keo Seima REDD+ project also coming under fire as Indigenous communities in the northeast of the country told Mongabay that they had also lost land and endured abuse at the hands of authorities in the name of conservation.

The myriad scandals engulfing the carbon market have created a crisis of confidence, leading Singapore to announce at the end of 2023 that it would exclude most REDD+ projects from bilateral trading agreements. Carbon offsetting is increasingly growing less popular as a means for companies to meet their own carbon-neutrality targets, although Vietnam received more than $51 million from the World Bank through the sale of verified emissions reductions.

Widespread efforts to restore mangroves in Thailand’s saw a government move to pair coastal communities with corporate partners to leverage carbon markets. The initiative drew widespread skepticism from environmental groups, who warned the scheme could effectively transform public forests into corporate lands.

Meanwhile, Laos has been making preparations and signing various partnerships to develop REDD+ projects across its roughly 16 million hectares (40 million acres) of forest, although experts have warned that such projects risk exacerbating land tenure issues and could easily follow the same mistakes as other projects by displacing people.

The hidden cost of transition minerals

Another climate solution is the global drive to phase out fossil fuels. But this is also imposing renewed mining pressure on parts of Southeast Asia. Rapidly rising demand for minerals critical for the energy transition, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and rare earth elements, has seen harmful mining accelerate and spread to new locations, fueling human rights abuses, deforestation and environmental contamination.

Southeast Asia is home to some of the world’s largest reserves of transition minerals used for electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and electric grids. Almost one-quarter of global nickel reserves are found in Indonesia, with the Philippines close behind, and Myanmar and Vietnam host significant deposits of rare earth minerals.

With Thailand pushing to establish itself as an EV manufacturing hub, and Vietnam emerging as a solar leader in Southeast Asia, governments and the private sector are clamoring to exploit mineral resources. Researchers, meanwhile, are urging caution and point to cases where communities and the environment have paid dearly. Multiple investigations have documented hundreds of human rights and ecological abuses linked to transition mineral mining, such as social unrest in Indonesia, forcible evictions in the Philippines, and contaminated waterways and pollution in Myanmar.

China’s outsourcing of its rare earth mining to bordering Myanmar expanded through 2024, according to investigations, where its effects are particularly insidious. With little social or environmental oversight amid the ongoing conflict in the country, profits are reportedly reaped by military-linked groups and fuel further conflicts.

Given the high risk of environmental degradation and human rights abuses making their way into global supply chains and household products, communities and rights groups are calling for improved transparency, inclusivity and environmental standards in the industry.

Infrastructure, agriculture and logging driving deforestation

The spike in deforestation linked to mining sits within a broader context of continued logging throughout the region, with a study published April 10 in Nature linking deforestation to the construction of “ghost roads” spanning 1.37 million kilometers (851,000 miles) across biodiversity hotspots in New Guinea, Borneo and Sumatra. These informal road networks were found to sprawl between three and 6.6 times more than recorded in officially recognized databases.

Across Southeast Asia, infrastructure development was a leading cause of deforestation in 2024. In Cambodia, the construction of new hydropower dams across the Cardamom Mountains has seen thousands of hectares of rainforest vanish, including some from which carbon credits were to be sold. At the same time, work began on a roughly 300-km (190-mi) transmission line that threatens to slice Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary in half. The same sanctuary has long been targeted by a logging syndicate that Mongabay exposed as shipping illegally logged timber from Cambodia throughout the world, including to the United States in the form of supposedly sustainable wood flooring products.

These were not the only illicit wood products making their way from Southeast Asia to global markets; Myanmar’s ongoing conflict has seen natural resource exploitation rise in tandem with factions’ need to finance the fighting. Despite wide-ranging sanctions, banned Myanmar teak was found entering the European markets — even reaching as far as Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, whose $500 million superyacht was found to be decked with sanctioned teak from Myanmar.

But it’s not just luxury products driving deforestation in Southeast Asia: various agricultural commodities grown across the region may find themselves under more scrutiny as the European Union’s new antideforestation regulation has prompted much debate among governments, the private sector and conservationists. Many globally consumed products that originate from Southeast Asia have been found to drive deforestation, even in supposedly protected areas.

A 2024 analysis of Global Forest Watch data showed that Cambodia lost forest cover the size of the city of Los Angeles, or 121,000 hectares (300,000 acres), with much of these losses attributed to deforestation inside protected areas. Meanwhile, across the border, in Thailand, illegal logging remains among the many threats to hornbills, with a study finding hornbill populations in southern Thailand were struggling to survive in increasingly degraded environments.

Similarly, the Thai government’s plans to redraw the boundaries of Thap Lan National Park, a key tiger habitat and one of mainland Southeast Asia’s last intact forests, sparked concern that the change could see a return of the illegal logging that has decimated Thai forests over the past two decades.

In Vietnam, where two-thirds of the nation’s forests are considered degraded, reforestation efforts focused on acacia and eucalyptus have come under fire from conservationists who argue that this approach risks displacing communities and malnourishing soil. Domestic sources of legitimate timber may reduce Vietnam’s reliance imports of illicit timber from across Africa, which were found to have continued over 2024, driving deforestation as far away as Cameroon.

Data released in 2024 showed that Laos recorded a sharp spike in primary forest loss across 2023, undermining steps taken by the Laotian government to address illegal logging, which resulted in a timber smuggling ring being rumbled by authorities.

Endangered environmentalists

As forest cover disappeared across Southeast Asia, so too did many activists who had tried to raise the alarm over environmental issues, continuing a grim trend of repression throughout the year.

Six environmental activists were detained and interrogated for nearly three days in Cambodia while monitoring a well-known illegal logging operation inside a protected area. While the six were eventually released without charge, their equipment was seized, they were forced to record apology videos and thumbprint documents promising that they would not enter protected areas without permission from the government. Repression continued across Cambodia, with rights groups documenting more than 100 arrests over 2024; several high-profile cases included the jailing of 10 activists from Mother Nature Cambodia, who were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison on charges of plotting against the government. In December 2024, environmental journalist Chhoeung Chheng, who had covered land disputes and illegal logging in northern Cambodia, was shot and killed by a suspected logger.

Brutal tactics were also on display in the Philippines, where, in late 2023, activists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano were kidnapped by the military while traveling to protest land reclamation projects in Manila Bay. After the pair were eventually freed, the court of appeals denied their request for protective writs in August 2024.

In September 2024, Vietnam made the surprise move of releasing Hoàng Thị Minh Hồng, an environmental advocate who roughly one year earlier had been sentenced to three years in prison on tax evasion charges that were widely believed to be bogus. But this small win has done little to rebalance the chilling effect that Vietnamese arrests have had on its environmental movement. The 88 Project, which champions free speech in Vietnam, has documented 178 cases of imprisoned activists; among them, 87 worked on environmental issues.

Meanwhile, Thai activists and journalists reported this year that they were increasingly becoming the targets of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) amid an erosion of democratic norms and values.

This year also saw more cases of violence surrounding environmental issues. In Laos, a village chief who vocally opposed a gold mining operation was gunned down by an unknown assailant shortly after voicing his grievances.

A few wins for the environment

Southeast Asia has long been a dangerous place for environmental activism and journalism, but while many activists faced insurmountable challenges, there were rare wins documented across the region and many communities continue to advocate for the future of the natural resources that sustain them.

Amid the ongoing conflict in Myanmar and its associated intensifying pressure on natural resources and land, Indigenous Karen communities are mapping and documenting land titles to protect villagers against government land grabs, megaprojects and extractive industries. Some 3.5 million hectares (8.6 million acres) of land have been mapped under the initiative, including reserved forests and wildlife sanctuaries.

The Indigenous Semai tribe of Malaysia’s Perak state also demonstrated the power of concerted local action. The tribe achieved a significant legal victory when a court ordered a hydroelectric dam project to cease operations and vacate the tribe’s ancestral land after it was ruled the developers, Perak Hydro Renewable Energy Corporation and Conso Hydro RE, had not obtained proper consent from the community.

International recognitions also showed the region’s environmental advocates have impacts far beyond their communities. Joan Carling became the first Indigenous Filipino to win the Right Livelihood Award, a platform she leveraged to call for greater recognition of Indigenous peoples as partners and central actors in conservation and climate action.

The year also saw some evidence that conservation efforts focused on wildlife and habitats are paying off. Glimmers of hope were awakened in Cambodia’s beleaguered Cardamom Mountains when the NGO Fauna & Flora recorded 60 Siamese crocodile hatchings in the area, indicating the critically endangered species was successfully breeding. Later in the year, a study further underscored the biodiversity value of the location when camera traps revealed 108 species living in the landscape, including 23 that are threatened with extinction. In Thailand, camera-trapping studies demonstrated a steady recovery of tigers in the Western Forest Complex, while NGOs successfully rehabilitated and released captive gibbons. And in Myanmar, scientists identified the world’s largest known population of skywalker gibbons.

Evidence that there’s still plenty of biodiversity worth protecting in the increasingly dammed Mekong River was also uncovered. Teams continued to document iconic giant fish species in the watercourse through 2024, such as the giant salmon carp, once thought extinct in the river, and the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish.

New species records and descriptions also highlight the region as a biodiversity hotspot. According to a report compiled by WWF, 234 new species were described in the five countries that make up the Greater Mekong region in 2023. However, the findings were accompanied by stark warnings that many species risk vanishing even before they’re described.

With countries in Southeast Asia pivotal in the illegal wildlife trade, 2024 saw signs that emerging approaches, such as DNA investigations of shark fins, and interagency and transnational investigations, could help curb the trade.

Nature-based solutions are increasingly recognized across Southeast Asia as a means of addressing the biodiversity and climate crises while also meeting societal needs for resources, such as water, nourishment and shelter.

Projects initiated from the grassroots level to government programs implemented alongside private sector and civil society actors have met with varied levels of success, but positive stories continue to emerge.

Beekeeping, long recognized as an economically viable and environmentally friendly source of income, is helping communities protect mangroves in Thailand. Also in Thailand, rubber agroforestry systems are boosting local biodiversity while improving farmers’ bottom lines. In the Philippines, rural women are using traditional methods of seed saving to safeguard ancient heirloom legumes, and also traditional healing practices to safeguard medicinal plants for future generations.

Restoration of coastal ecosystems and wetlands is also coming to the forefront of planning, given the region is home to immense rivers, a vast collective coastline and some of the fastest-sinking cities on the planet. Efforts to factor water management into city design include an urban park in Bangkok, which uses tree planting, weirs and artificial floodplains to absorb excess rainwater. Coastal communities are also calling for better integration of natural ecosystems in flood prevention schemes, recognizing that solutions must go beyond artificial infrastructure, particularly in storm-prone areas.

As the climate crisis continues to alter the landscape across Southeast Asia, the future remains uncertain for the region, which boasts vast ecological significance and the potential to address these issues. But the stakes are high; millions of people’s lives and livelihoods are inextricably tied to the region’s ecosystems, as is the survival a wide range of wildlife and plant species. Southeast Asia will be a region closely watched by conservationists in 2025 as both a source of hope and cause for concern.

Banner image: A white-handed gibbon in one of the two gibbon rehabilitation fields at the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand center in Petchaburi. There are currently 96 gibbons inside the center. Image by Ana Norman Bermúdez for Mongabay.