Southeast Asia’s 2025 marked by fatal floods, fossil fuel expansion and renewed mining boom

BANGKOK — 2025 saw global conservation plunged into chaos, with an estimated $500 million in funding from the United States government abruptly slashed after Donald Trump returned to office.

The ripples of Trump’s policies were felt across the world, disproportionately impacting countries with the least domestic conservation resources.

Across Southeast Asia, every element of conservation was disrupted, from wildlife crime prevention to reforestation projects, as well as studies on fish in the Mekong River and vital environmental reporting in Indonesia. Even after the dust settled, very few funding alternatives have emerged, as European countries also cut foreign aid budgets (including funds earmarked for conservation) in favor of military spending.

None of this bodes well for Southeast Asia, where the region’s vulnerability to climate change is compounded by a sluggish transition away from the fossil fuels driving climate change, and economies still dominated by the exploitation of natural resources.

Trapped in a vicious cycle

More than 1,800 people across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Sri Lanka died in extreme flooding events over the course of November and December 2025, with death tolls anticipated to rise as humanitarian efforts continue.

Across the three Southeast Asian countries, the deadly floods are believed to have been caused by Cyclone Senyar, which was born out of sudden spikes in heavy rain brought about by human-made global heating. The frequency and intensity of deadly extreme weather events has ramped up in recent years, with the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam all experiencing devastating typhoons in 2024.

Yet the human and economic costs of these events have done little to spur meaningful action for much of the region’s energy transition. In Indonesia, despite official plans to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2035, more than 7 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity came online since 2021.

A similar situation is playing out in Thailand, where the government announced in August 2025 that the country’s largest coal plant will continue to operate for longer than planned, despite air pollution from the plant having sickened local residents. Fossil fuels still make up 85% of the country’s energy mix, with solar and wind accounting for just 5%.

Farther east along the Gulf of Thailand, the situation in Cambodia is slightly more balanced, with coal making up about half of the country’s energy mix and the rest predominantly generated via hydropower dams. But Cambodia’s continued pursuit of hydropower expansion has seen forests logged, conservation projects threatened and Indigenous communities dispossessed.

Across the border in Laos, hydropower remains the dominant energy source, but while this dodges some of the trappings of coal and gas, the Laotian ambition to become the “battery of Southeast Asia” has seen the region’s hydrology radically altered as rivers are bent to the whims of dam developers. These dams, including the new Luang Prabang dam currently under construction, have created conditions in which many of the Mekong River’s megafauna have struggled to survive.

Some semblance of hope for the region is embodied by Vietnam’s comparatively rapid transition toward more sustainable power sources, although over the course of 2024 — the most recent period for which data are available — the country of nearly 102 million still generated 56% of its power from coal. Vietnam’s 13% share of wind and solar still sits below the 15% global average.

Drop in deforestation data

While the regional pace of energy transition remains sluggish, the rate of deforestation also slowed across much of the Mekong countries in 2024, as per Mongabay’s analysis of Global Forest Watch (GFW) data. However, GFW data show that nearly 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of tree cover were lost across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, with more than 30% of these losses occurring inside protected areas.

In Malaysia, primary forest losses fell by roughly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) between 2023 and 2024, to roughly 69,000 hectares (170,500 acres), GFW data show. Across the Philippines, only around 6,100 hectares (15,000 acres) of primary forest were reported as lost in 2024 by GFW — among the lowest years since GFW’s records began.

Indonesia, meanwhile, saw deforestation slow down in the early 2020s, with slight upticks in 2023 and 2024. Early data from 2025 suggest that this year may see a larger increase, with the new administration of President Prabowo Subianto championing the expansion of food, biofuel and oil palm plantations across the archipelago.

The global green transition harming Southeast Asia

Even attempts to decarbonize the global economy have left their mark on the region’s ecosystems, which have been ravaged by mining operations that feed into the electric vehicle and renewable energy markets.

Unregulated rare earth mining operations have proliferated across Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan states in recent years as global demand spiked and key producers of the 17 key elements have begun safeguarding their domestic supplies, halting exports. In October 2025, U.S.-based think tank the Stimson Center identified more than 500 rare earth mining sites in Myanmar. Besides resulting in widespread deforestation, the mining methods used in Myanmar have seen vast amounts of toxic runoff flowing into nearby rivers, which have carried them downstream into Thailand. The freshwater crisis unfolding in northern Thailand looks set to persist into 2026 as the Thai government has failed to find any meaningful leverage with the ethnic armed groups operating the rare earth mines in Myanmar.

Myanmar is not alone, though. The rare earth mining rush has expanded into Laos, where the government has already struggled to tackle illegal and unregulated mining operations, as the demand for valuable minerals such as dysprosium and terbium has rapidly accelerated over the course of 2025.

Rare earth elements in particular are key to the production of various green energy technology, from solar panels to wind turbines, but it’s not just these minerals that are being extracted at a heavy environmental cost to fuel the energy transition. In the Philippines, nickel mining operations have caused damage near a UNESCO World Heritage Site and created long-lasting problems among fisheries, farmlands and key water sources.

At the start of 2025, Indonesia rapidly pushed through legislation that opened up its mining sector, especially for non-traditional actors such as universities and religious groups, prompting fears that deforestation and mining-related pollution could accelerate. And while the Indonesian government revoked some of the most controversial nickel mining licenses in June 2025, nickel extraction has proliferated rapidly across the country over the course of 2025, despite widespread opposition from Indigenous communities and questions over the legality of these new mines.

Not just humans paying the cost in 2025

These impacts aren’t being felt just by people. Degradation of forests, wetlands and the ocean are affecting key wildlife populations across the region. Southeast Asia has one of the world’s highest concentrations of critically endangered species, according to a 2025 global study. Indonesia and the Philippines each have more than 410 species staring down the barrel of imminent extinction, the study noted.

However, given evidence that weak enforcement in the region leaves even protected areas and biodiversity hotspots vulnerable, particularly in Cambodia and Laos, it’s clearer than ever that protected area status alone is insufficient to truly safeguard biodiversity.

The scope of habitat loss across the region isn’t limited to forests. Wetlands, coastal mangroves and peatlands continue to be cleared for oil palm, rice and aquaculture, even as research shows that protecting peatlands and mangroves could halve Southeast Asia’s land-use emissions and contribute significantly to global carbon reduction targets.

Climate change-related threats, such as extreme temperatures, floods, droughts, storms and ocean acidification, also posed serious threats to wildlife through 2025. Researchers quantified for the first time the global biodiversity toll of climate change, finding that 5% of 70,000 assessed animal species are directly affected by climate-related pressures. Across Southeast Asia, these effects manifested as degraded reefs amid record sea temperatures, disrupted river fish migrations, and extreme heat worsened by deforestation.

Moreover, as many as 35 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) — 4% of the species’ total population — may have been wiped out in the catastrophic floods and landslides that hit Sumatra toward the end of the year. In response to the destruction, officials in Indonesia have spoken out about “poor forest management” exacerbating the intensity of the destruction, calling for forest governance reforms.

Experts in Thailand similarly pointed to unsustainable coastal management as compounding climate change-related impacts that have upset the balance of critical marine ecosystems. Catastrophic seagrass declines triggered a mass die-off of dugongs (Dugong dugon) in the Andaman Sea through 2025, once home to one of the world’s most significant populations of the marine mammal.

The illegal wildlife trade, meanwhile, continued to paint a bleak picture for Southeast Asia’s biodiversity, exacerbated by shrinking resources available for antitrafficking efforts in the wake of sweeping U.S. government funding cuts during the first quarter of the year.

Much of the illegal wildlife trade is driven by demand from outside the region, raising concerns over cross-border regulatory oversight and enforcement. New analyses by wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, for instance, indicated hundreds of gibbons have been confiscated by authorities across South and Southeast Asia in the past decade, with India emerging as a major destination sustained by a deeply opaque pet trade and rise in private zoos. Even new infrastructure development in Laos has been found to at least partially drive the illegal wildlife trade, as a joint investigation between Mongabay and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime uncovered the proliferation of shops selling illegal wildlife products in Laos — a business model that specifically targets Chinese tourists, whose numbers have increased since a China-Laos railway began operating.

Meanwhile, biomedical research laboratories, primarily in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea, continue to rely on long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), fueling a multibillion-dollar trade in the species that the IUCN announced this year will retain its endangered status primarily due the risk of poaching. Thailand emerged as a hotspot for macaque poaching, with poachers capturing monkeys in urban areas before smuggling them across the Mekong River into Laos and Cambodia, from where they’re channeled through breeding farms and exported as captive-bred animals.

Demand for live animals and their body parts also remains rampant within Southeast Asia. Officials continued to confiscate massive shipments of songbirds across Indonesia, where deep cultural traditions drive a persistent trade threatening wild songbird populations. The trade urgently requires stricter regulation and efforts to curb demand, experts say, to reduce the risk of extinctions of wild birds and the spread of animal-borne diseases to people.

Tigers were also at the sharp end of the illegal trade. In separate incidents over the course of just one month in Sumatra, officials found a female tiger with its leg amputated, most likely by a snare, and arrested multiple suspects on charges of butchering and allegedly selling tiger body parts. A six-month investigation also revealed how criminal networks orchestrate tiger poaching and trade in Peninsular Malaysia, exploiting human trafficking victims and weak border controls.

Wildlife trade also continues to affect Southeast Asia’s two species of rhino. An update on the status of the world’s rhinos showed that while species in parts of Africa and India are trending upward, Javan rhinos (Rhinoceros sondaicus) and Sumatran rhinos (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) continue to decline. The assessment pointed to poaching for their horns and habitat loss as driving a 30% drop in Javan rhino numbers, an assessment made grimmer by the recent death of the first translocated Javan rhino. Meanwhile, Sumatran rhinos remain perilously close to extinction: fewer than 47 are thought to remain.

Discoveries show there’s still much to protect

Several pieces of good news did emerge from the region in 2025. New wildlife populations and species were discovered, some of them in previously unexplored locations, underscoring what’s at stake should conservation efforts falter.

In North Sumatra, researchers discovered a new population of critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans living in a peat swamp roughly 30 kilometers (19 miles) away from their only previously known habitat in the Batang Toru forest. In central Vietnam’s upland forests, researchers documented a new population of gray-shanked douc langurs (Pygathrix cinerea). Meanwhile, in Laos’s Annamite Mountains, teams attempting to track the long-unseen saola ox (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) homed in on a population of unusual langurs that experts say might be an entirely new species.

Surveys carried out by Fauna & Flora in Cambodia’s Samlout Multiple Use Area identified 140 bird, 30 mammal, 15 bat and 50 orchid species, some of which may be new to science. However, the researchers also documented deforestation and the presence of armed groups in the biodiverse area that borders Thailand, raising fears it could be drawn into ongoing border conflicts.

Efforts also got underway to restore key species and habitats through national and grassroots initiatives. Indonesia and Thailand are pursuing cutting-edge shark restoration programs, centering scientific rigor and the participation of students and villagers to make the projects sustainable.

Community-led reforestation of mangroves in the Philippine city of Tacloban has successfully restored natural coastal protection in an area devastated by a typhoon in 2013, satellite imaging revealed. In northern Thailand, women-led community forest teams have developed innovative ways of suppressing forest fires in a landscape ravaged by choking seasonal haze caused by annual burning.

While more inclusive policies are still needed, evidence continued to show the communities who live with, maintain and depend on ecosystems are crucial to the success of carbon-based initiatives and nature-based solutions, underscoring the need for projects to go beyond carbon metrics to prioritize the sustainability of local livelihoods, as well as habitat connectivity and biodiversity preservation.

Banner image: A juvenile Tapanuli orangutan in Lumut Maju peat swamp forest, beyond the species known range,  by Junaidi Hanafiah/Mongabay-Indonesia.

Credits

Isabel Esterman Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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