From the bright lights of Bangkok

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Thitarat Sriwattanapong
My name is Thitarat Sriwattanapong.  I am a student from Thailand but I live in Laos.  Now I'm working towards a PhD to be applied next year.  I was interested in environmental issues since I was young, because my house is near the Khao Yai National Park, it is a very big park in there and I can see a lot of different changes every time when I come back to my hometown, so everything like the impact to the whole environment, even the little things, so that I will try to help the environment a lot, since it was studying in the secondary school and also high school, and when I was in the university.  So try to do something more on environmental issues. 

In the tsunami period in Thailand, I used to be one of the volunteers to help them recover from the disaster management, and also during my time in the university as a lecturer I also do some research on the environmental issues. 

So every time when I come here, I see lots more building, more lights, more hotels, more restaurants, and even more road and bridges constructed.  So everything is changed, there’s a lot of new building, building up every year, and you can see many five star building.  You can see that Bangkok is a never ending and never sleeping city. 

My work is related to the Mekong region, so I try to collect more news as much as possible for the things happening on the Mekong River, and then we will try to have some more analysing on what happened on the Mekong, and then this will help me a lot in doing the PhD on the trans weather impact on the dam in the Mekong region. 

The next five years, I will finish PhD already and will be back with the community to help the people get the adaptation with the climate change, living their life without any problems from the environmental issues.  I feel very positive too that in 20 years’ time because people will be more aware on the what happened now, so we can have some more preparation and actions together, as I believe that we can pass this on together and we will be more green in the future. 

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