7.1 Southeast Asia: A Region Made by Water and Fire

 

Section 1: A Region Made by Water and Fire

Learning Objectives

After completing this section, students should be able to:

1. Distinguish between mainland and maritime Southeast Asia and explain how tectonic forces created their contrasting landscapes.
2. Explain how monsoons, rivers, deltas, and seasonal flooding support agriculture and dense settlement.
3. Evaluate the benefits and costs of dams and other changes to the Mekong River system.
4. Distinguish between a natural hazard and a disaster by examining cyclones, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
5. Explain how the geography of Southeast Asia helped Alfred Russel Wallace independently develop the theory of evolution by natural selection.
6. Connect palm oil production to everyday consumer goods, economic development, deforestation, peat fires, haze, and increased flood risk.

A Geography That Moves

Look at Southeast Asia for long enough and the map begins to move.

Tectonic plates collide beneath the islands. Volcanoes rise, erupt, collapse, and enrich the soil around them. Monsoon winds reverse with the seasons. Rivers swell across their floodplains and then retreat. In Cambodia, the Tonle Sap River actually changes direction during the wet season. Smoke from burning peat in Indonesia drifts into neighboring countries. Across one narrow stretch of sea, familiar Asian animals give way to creatures whose evolutionary relatives lie far to the east.

Few regions show the connective power of geography so plainly. The same tectonic forces that produce catastrophic earthquakes also build islands and fertile soils. The same seasonal floods that threaten cities nourish rice fields and fisheries. The same forests that contain extraordinary biodiversity also stand on land coveted by plantation companies, farmers, mining firms, and governments.

Nature has not divided Southeast Asia into tidy subjects called geology, climate, agriculture, and economics. Those are shelves humans built for our own convenience. On the ground, everything remains entangled.

Southeast Asia is a region created by movement: moving plates, air, water, species, people, and commodities.

One Region, Two Physical Worlds

Southeast Asia contains two broad physical regions.

Mainland Southeast Asia occupies the Indochina Peninsula and the northern Malay Peninsula. It includes Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the mainland portion of Malaysia. Mountain chains and plateaus generally extend north to south, separated by river valleys, plains, and deltas. These lower landscapes contain much of the region’s farmland, transportation infrastructure, and urban population.

Maritime Southeast Asia consists of the island world extending from Sumatra and Java through the Philippines, Sulawesi, the Maluku Islands, Timor, and thousands of smaller islands. Indonesia contains more than 17,000 islands, although the number varies according to how an island is defined and whether a sandbar visible only at low tide receives the full diplomatic recognition of a name. The Philippines contains more than 7,000 islands, while Malaysia occupies land on both the Malay Peninsula and Borneo.

The distinction is useful, but it can also mislead students raised on land-centered maps. The sea did not merely separate Southeast Asia. For much of its history, it connected the region more efficiently than mountains and tropical forests did. Boats carried food, pottery, spices, people, languages, religions, and political authority between islands. Maritime Southeast Asia is not a continent that has broken apart. It is a geographical world organized around coastlines, ports, straits, reefs, and sea routes.

Even the mainland is shaped by movement toward water. The Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, Mekong, and Red rivers descend from uplands, gather tributaries, and spread into broad plains and deltas. Cities including Yangon, Bangkok, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Ho Chi Minh City developed on landscapes created and continually rearranged by rivers (Fouberg & Moseley, 2017).

Where Continents Collide

Southeast Asia occupies one of Earth’s most complicated tectonic neighborhoods. The Eurasian, Indo-Australian, Philippine Sea, and Pacific plates meet there, accompanied by smaller fragments and fault systems that make the geological map look as though someone assembled a jigsaw puzzle during an earthquake.

In maritime Southeast Asia, much of the activity results from subduction, in which one tectonic plate descends beneath another. Water and other materials released from the sinking plate encourage rock above it to melt. Magma rises toward the surface and forms chains of volcanoes called volcanic arcs.

Indonesia and the Philippines lie partly along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the broad zone of plate boundaries, trenches, earthquakes, and volcanoes surrounding much of the Pacific Ocean. Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and the Philippine islands are not passive pieces of land resting upon the sea. They are visible portions of a tectonic system that remains under construction.

The result is a grim but productive bargain. An eruption can bury villages, destroy crops, interrupt aviation, and displace thousands of people. Over longer periods, however, volcanic ash and rock weather into mineral-rich soils. Java became one of the world’s most densely populated large islands partly because its volcanic soils, warm climate, and abundant rainfall supported highly productive agriculture. The volcano is therefore not simply a threat looming above the village. It helped make the village possible.

Tectonic uplift and tropical rainfall have also created spectacular limestone landscapes. Rainwater absorbs carbon dioxide and becomes mildly acidic, gradually dissolving limestone into caves, sinkholes, underground drainage systems, and steep-sided towers. This karst topography is found in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Its dramatic scenery now draws tourists, but its caves, groundwater systems, and specialized habitats are easily damaged.

The landscape is not finished. It never was.

The Monsoon Is Not a Storm

Students sometimes hear the word monsoon and imagine one gigantic rainstorm arriving like an atmospheric freight train. A monsoon is actually a seasonal change in prevailing winds, usually accompanied by a pronounced shift between wetter and drier conditions.

Land heats and cools more rapidly than the ocean. During the warmer part of the year, intense heating over Asia encourages air to rise, creating lower pressure. Moist air is pulled inland from surrounding seas. As it rises over warm land or mountain slopes, it cools, condenses, and produces rain.

During the cooler season, the pressure pattern changes. Continental air becomes cooler and denser, and winds flow outward toward the sea. Much of mainland Southeast Asia then enters a drier season.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, helps organize this annual rhythm. It is a broad belt where warm, moisture-bearing air converges and rises. The ITCZ moves north and south during the year as the zone of strongest solar heating shifts. The astronomical machinery is complex, but the geographical result is plain: the rain belt moves.

Areas near the equator, including much of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, may receive considerable rainfall throughout the year. Farther north, wet and dry seasons are more distinct. Farming calendars, water supplies, religious festivals, transportation, and household routines have long been synchronized with the arrival and retreat of monsoon rains.

The monsoon is regular, but it is not perfectly reliable. Rains may arrive late, fail early, or fall in violent bursts. El Niño often contributes to drought in parts of maritime Southeast Asia, while La Niña may bring unusually heavy rain. Climate change is adding further instability through rising temperatures, changing rainfall extremes, sea-level rise, and warmer oceans (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2022).

Rivers That Build Countries

Mainland Southeast Asia’s great rivers are not features placed within the landscape. They are among the forces that built it.

The Irrawaddy River drains much of Myanmar before spreading into a wide delta. The Chao Phraya crosses Thailand’s central plain and flows through Bangkok. The Red River descends from southern China and forms its delta around Hanoi. The Mekong begins on the Tibetan Plateau and passes through or along China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Rivers carry sediment as well as water. When a river slows near the sea, it loses some of its ability to carry sand, silt, and clay. These materials settle and gradually form a delta. Deltas are usually low, flat, fertile, and well watered, making them attractive locations for farms, ports, transportation routes, and cities.

They are also flood-prone.

Flooding is not always a failure of the river. Seasonal floods deposit nutrients, replenish soil moisture, recharge wetlands, and support fisheries. Farmers have cultivated rice in floodplains precisely because rivers periodically escape their channels. The challenge is not to abolish water from a floodplain, which is rather like trying to remove snow from the concept of Minnesota. It is to live with seasonal water while limiting the destruction caused by extreme rainfall, badly planned development, disappearing wetlands, and obstructed drainage.

Rice terraces represent another adaptation. Farmers in the uplands of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere have reshaped slopes into a series of level steps. Terraces slow runoff, hold water, reduce erosion, and make farming possible where flat land is scarce. Tourists often photograph them as though they appeared naturally. In reality, a terrace is living infrastructure, maintained through generations of labor and local knowledge.

The Mekong: One River, Six Countries

The Mekong is not simply a blue line crossing six differently colored political territories. It is one connected system of mountains, tributaries, dams, wetlands, fish, farms, cities, deltas, and human decisions.

Tens of millions of people in the Lower Mekong Basin depend directly or indirectly upon its water, fertile land, fisheries, and transportation routes. Its seasonal flood pulse expands rivers into floodplains and wetlands, creating habitats in which fish feed, migrate, and reproduce. The Mekong River Commission estimates that the annual floods provide billions of dollars in ecological and economic benefits through fisheries, soil fertility, and other services (Mekong River Commission [MRC], n.d.-a).

The most remarkable example is Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake. During the dry season, water flows out of the lake through the Tonle Sap River toward the Mekong. During the wet season, the swollen Mekong pushes water backward. The Tonle Sap River reverses direction, the lake expands, forests flood, and fish spread into newly available habitats.

This reversal supports one of the world’s most productive inland fisheries. It also depends upon timing. A flood pulse that arrives late, remains too low, or retreats too quickly can disrupt spawning, fishing, agriculture, and food supplies.

The river is now increasingly engineered. Hydropower dams generate electricity, provide state revenue, and allow countries to sell power across borders. Laos has promoted hydropower as a central development strategy. Yet dams also obstruct fish migration, alter water temperature, change seasonal flows, displace communities, and trap sediment that would otherwise replenish downstream farms and the Mekong Delta (MRC, n.d.-b).

The sediment problem is easy to overlook because electricity is visible on a bill while missing mud is not. The Vietnamese delta was assembled grain by grain over thousands of years. When dams trap sediment, sand is mined from channels, and groundwater extraction causes land to sink, the delta receives less material with which to rebuild itself. At the same time, sea levels rise and saltwater pushes inland.

Recent years have brought droughts, erratic rainfall, intense flooding, declining sediment trends, greater salinity intrusion, and unusually short or weak reverse flows into Tonle Sap. During 2020 and 2021, reverse-flow volumes were among the lowest recorded since monitoring began, with consequences for fish catches and livelihoods. Rainfall shortages were a major cause, while reservoirs and other alterations also changed the timing of flows (MRC, 2022, 2024).

No single dam, drought, farmer, or country explains the changes. They are cumulative. The electricity may be generated in Laos while part of the environmental cost appears in Cambodia or Vietnam. Political borders divide governments; the river ignores them.

When a Hazard Becomes a Disaster

A hurricane, typhoon, and tropical cyclone are regional names for the same general kind of rotating tropical storm. In the western Pacific, such storms are generally called typhoons. In the Indian Ocean, they are usually called cyclones.

Southeast Asia provides warm seas in which tropical cyclones can intensify. The Philippines and Vietnam lie along major western Pacific storm tracks, while Myanmar can be struck by cyclones forming over the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Nargis entered Myanmar’s low-lying Irrawaddy Delta in May 2008. Storm surge and wind devastated densely settled farming communities, leaving approximately 138,000 people dead or missing. Yet the storm’s meteorology cannot by itself explain the losses. Housing was vulnerable, transportation and communications were limited, many communities stood only slightly above sea level, and the military government initially restricted international relief access. ASEAN eventually helped mediate the relief effort (Government of Myanmar, ASEAN, & United Nations, 2008; United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2020).

A natural hazard is a physical event with the potential to cause harm. A disaster occurs when it intersects with exposed people, vulnerable buildings, poverty, weak infrastructure, political decisions, and inadequate preparation. Nature provides the storm. Society helps determine who receives a warning, whose house can withstand it, and how quickly assistance arrives.

The same principle applies to earthquakes and tsunamis.

On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off northern Sumatra displaced the seafloor and generated a tsunami across the Indian Ocean. Banda Aceh was struck within minutes. The waves later reached Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and the coast of East Africa. More than 220,000 people died across the affected region.

A tsunami is not simply an oversized wind-driven wave. It begins when an earthquake, landslide, or volcanic event rapidly displaces water. In the deep ocean, the wave may travel extraordinarily fast without appearing especially tall. As it reaches shallow coastal water, it slows, compresses, and rises. The sea may first retreat, exposing the seafloor. In 2004, some people approached the newly revealed shore, unaware that the ocean had drawn back before returning.

The 2018 Palu disaster in Indonesia demonstrated how hazards combine. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake generated a tsunami in the narrow bay and caused severe liquefaction, in which water-saturated sediment lost its strength. In several neighborhoods, the ground flowed, carrying buildings and people with it. Earthquake, water, soil, settlement location, and construction became one catastrophe.

Southeast Asia is not cursed by nature. The same coasts, rivers, and soils support millions of people. Abundance and danger often arise from the same geographical processes.

Wallace, Darwin, and the Other Discovery of Evolution

In the nineteenth century, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace spent eight years traveling through what he called the Malay Archipelago, much of present-day Indonesia and Malaysia. He collected birds, beetles, butterflies, mammals, and thousands of other specimens, aided by local guides and assistants who understood the landscapes far better than any newly arrived European could.

Wallace noticed something strange. Islands lying close together could contain sharply different animal communities. Bali possessed animals associated with continental Asia. Across the narrow Lombok Strait, many of those species disappeared and were replaced by animals with stronger connections to the biological world of Australia.

The boundary became known as the Wallace Line.

West of the line, Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Borneo rest on the shallow Sunda Shelf. During ice ages, sea levels fell and exposed much of that shelf, connecting those islands to mainland Asia. Elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, apes, and other land animals could spread across it.

East of Bali and Borneo, deep channels remained underwater even when global sea level was much lower. Many land animals could not cross. The islands within the transitional region now called Wallacea, including Sulawesi, Lombok, Flores, and parts of the Maluku Islands, developed peculiar mixtures of Asian and Australian life, along with many endemic species found nowhere else.

The Wallace Line is not an invisible electric fence. Birds fly, seeds float, animals occasionally raft across water, and humans transport species. It is better understood as a broad biological transition. Wallace’s great insight was that the distribution of living things preserved evidence of geological history.

This was not his only discovery.

Charles Darwin had privately developed the idea of evolution by natural selection years earlier, but he had not published a complete account. Working in the Malay Archipelago, Wallace independently arrived at essentially the same mechanism. In 1858, while on the island of Ternate, he wrote a concise explanation and mailed it to Darwin.

Darwin was astonished. Wallace had not merely offered a vague suggestion that species changed. He had reconstructed natural selection so clearly that Darwin regarded the paper as an excellent summary of his own unpublished theory. Wallace did not chronologically beat Darwin to the idea, but he reached it independently, thousands of miles away, without knowing how far Darwin’s thinking had progressed (Browne, 2013; Smith, 2014).

Their writings were presented together to the Linnean Society in July 1858. Neither man was present. Wallace was still in Southeast Asia, and Darwin was grieving the death of his young son. Darwin published On the Origin of Species the following year and became the famous name attached to evolution. Wallace became, unfairly but memorably, “the other Darwin.”

Yet Wallace had done something Darwin had not. He had used the geography of Southeast Asia to help establish biogeography, the study of why particular organisms live in particular places. The islands had shown him that isolation creates difference and that time magnifies it.

Evolution was not discovered only on the Galápagos. Part of it was mapped among the volcanoes, reefs, birds, beetles, and deep-water channels of Southeast Asia.

Why the Ground Burns

There is a good chance palm oil entered your life before breakfast.

It is used in cooking oil, margarine, non-dairy creamer, instant noodles, pizza dough, chocolate, cookies, crackers, doughnuts, ice cream, packaged bread, and many other processed foods. Palm-derived ingredients also appear in soaps, detergents, shampoos, cosmetics, toothpaste, candles, pharmaceuticals, and biodiesel (U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service, 2021; World Wildlife Fund, n.d.).

Palm oil is common because it is inexpensive, stable, versatile, and extraordinarily productive. Oil palms yield considerably more oil per hectare than most alternative oil crops. The industry supports millions of workers, smallholders, processors, truck drivers, port employees, and rural businesses. Indonesia and Malaysia dominate global production, and the crop has contributed to rising rural incomes in some areas.

This is why “just stop using palm oil” is not a complete solution. Replacing it entirely with soy, sunflower, or rapeseed oil could require more land elsewhere. The serious question is not simply whether palm oil exists. It is where plantations are built, what vegetation they replace, whose land is taken, how workers are treated, and whether companies can be held accountable for their supply chains (Meijaard et al., 2018).

The environmental costs are nevertheless immense when plantations replace tropical forests and peatlands.

Peat forms where dead vegetation accumulates in waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil faster than it can completely decompose. Over centuries, it becomes a thick layer of partially decayed plant matter containing enormous amounts of carbon.

Oil palms cannot thrive in a natural peat swamp without changing it. Companies and farmers dig drainage canals, lowering the water table. Once peat dries, it shrinks, sinks, releases carbon dioxide, and becomes flammable. Fire is a cheap method of clearing vegetation, but on drained peat it may burn beneath the surface. Rain can extinguish the flames above while the soil continues smoldering underground.

Plantation expansion is not the only cause of fire. Pulpwood production, logging, smallholder agriculture, land speculation, disputed ownership, weak enforcement, and drought all contribute. During strong El Niño years, dry conditions allow thousands of separate fires to merge into a regional crisis.

The smoke produces transboundary haze. Schools close in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Flights are delayed. Hospitals receive patients with respiratory problems. Wildlife habitat disappears, and carbon stored over centuries enters the atmosphere in days.

Draining peat produces another, less dramatic transformation: the land surface gradually sinks. As subsiding land approaches the level of nearby rivers and seas, drainage becomes more difficult and long-term flood risk rises. Rewetting projects can slow this process. A large restoration trial in South Sumatra found that raising water levels through canal blocking roughly halved measured peat-surface subsidence in the rewetted area and encouraged the return of native peat-swamp trees (Hooijer et al., 2024).

Oil-palm development can also affect flooding outside peatlands. Removing forest reduces the interception of rain by leaves and roots. Plantation roads and compacted soils can decrease infiltration, causing water to move across the surface more rapidly.

A 2024 study examining more than 2,000 reported floods in Aceh found that flooding was more likely in areas with lower tree cover, greater oil-palm coverage, and heavier rainfall. The study did not claim that palm oil single-handedly caused every flood. It showed that land use can amplify the effects of rainfall and that poorer, less densely populated communities often bear the greatest losses (Lubis et al., 2024).

That distinction is important. A storm supplies the water. A transformed watershed helps decide where it goes.

The geography extends all the way to the supermarket. Forest may be cleared in Sumatra, investment may originate in Jakarta or Singapore, smoke may cross Malaysia, and the resulting oil may appear in a frozen pizza or bottle of shampoo in Minnesota. The plantation is local. The system is planetary.

Living Coasts

Southeast Asia’s coastlines include mangrove forests, coral reefs, seagrass beds, tidal flats, estuaries, and deltas. They are sometimes treated as vacant or disorderly spaces awaiting shrimp farms, resorts, ports, roads, and expensive housing. Their apparent disorder hides an elaborate system.

Mangroves tolerate salty water and oxygen-poor tidal soils. Their roots trap sediment, shelter young fish, store carbon, stabilize shorelines, and reduce wave energy. Coral reefs weaken incoming waves farther offshore, while seagrasses hold sediment between reefs and mangroves.

Clearing mangroves may produce an immediate profit, but it can also damage fisheries, release stored carbon, increase erosion, and expose settlements to storms. Mangroves cannot stop every cyclone or tsunami. They can help make ordinary coastal hazards less destructive.

These ecosystems now face sea-level rise, warming oceans, coral bleaching, pollution, destructive fishing, and coastal construction. The risks combine. Rising seas push against deltas that are sinking because of groundwater extraction. Heavy rain falls on paved cities with inadequate drainage. Drought dries peatlands already drained for plantations. Warmer water stresses reefs already weakened by pollution.

One problem rarely has the courtesy to arrive alone.

Geography as Possibility and Choice

Southeast Asia’s physical geography does not dictate one unavoidable future.

A volcano can destroy farmland, but it may also have created the soil beneath it. A dam can generate low-carbon electricity while depriving downstream communities of fish and sediment. Palm oil can increase rural income while plantations intensify fires, habitat loss, and flooding. A mangrove forest can be cleared for short-term development or retained as living coastal infrastructure.

Physical geography creates opportunities, constraints, pressures, and hazards. Human beings decide how land is used, whose knowledge matters, who receives the benefits, and who inherits the danger.

The region is made by water and fire. Its future will also be made by choices.

Key Terms

Mainland Southeast Asia: The continental portion of the region, organized largely around mountain ranges, rivers, plains, and deltas.

Maritime Southeast Asia: The island and archipelagic portion of the region.

Subduction: The process in which one tectonic plate descends beneath another.

Volcanic arc: A chain of volcanoes formed above a subduction zone.

Karst topography: A landscape of caves, sinkholes, underground drainage, and steep rock formations produced by dissolving limestone.

Monsoon: A seasonal reversal of prevailing winds, commonly associated with changing wet and dry conditions.

Intertropical Convergence Zone: A migrating belt of low pressure where warm, moist air converges and rises.

Delta: A low-lying landform created by sediment deposited near a river’s mouth.

Flood pulse: The seasonal expansion and contraction of a river and its connected floodplain ecosystems.

Natural hazard: A physical process with the potential to cause harm.

Disaster: A severe disruption occurring when a hazard intersects with exposed and vulnerable populations.

Liquefaction: The loss of strength in water-saturated sediment during intense shaking.

Biogeography: The study of the geographical distribution of organisms.

Wallace Line: A major biogeographical boundary between predominantly Asian animal communities and the transitional islands farther east.

Wallacea: The transitional biological region between the Asian and Australian continental shelves.

Endemic species: A species naturally found only within a particular geographical area.

Peatland: A wetland containing accumulated layers of partially decomposed plant material.

Transboundary haze: Air pollution that crosses international borders.

Mangrove: A salt-tolerant tree or shrub adapted to tidal coastal environments.

Thinking Geographically

1. Why is it misleading to describe seasonal flooding as entirely harmful in the Mekong Basin?
2. A dam generates electricity in one country but reduces fish and sediment in another. How should the costs and benefits be divided?
3. How did the geography of islands help Wallace independently develop natural selection?
4. Palm oil is connected to both development and environmental destruction. What policies could reduce harm without simply removing the incomes of small farmers and plantation workers?
5. Why is a flood better understood as the product of both rainfall and land-use decisions?

References

Browne, J. (2013). Wallace and Darwin. Current Biology, 23(24), R1071–R1072.

Fouberg, E. H., & Moseley, W. G. (2017). Understanding world regional geography (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

Government of Myanmar, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, & United Nations. (2008). Post-Nargis joint assessment.

Hooijer, A., Vernimmen, R., Mulyadi, D., Triantomo, V., Hamdani, Lampela, M., Agusti, R., Page, S. E., Doloksaribu, J., Setiawan, I., Suratmanto, B., & Swarup, S. (2024). Benefits of tropical peatland rewetting for subsidence reduction and forest regrowth: Results from a large-scale restoration trial. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 10721.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Asia. In Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.

Lubis, M. I., Linkie, M., & Lee, J. S. H. (2024). Tropical forest cover, oil palm plantations, and precipitation drive flooding events in Aceh, Indonesia, and hit the poorest people hardest. PLOS ONE, 19(10), e0311759.

Meijaard, E., Garcia-Ulloa, J., Sheil, D., Wich, S. A., Carlson, K. M., Juffe-Bignoli, D., & Brooks, T. M. (2018). Oil palm and biodiversity: A situation analysis by the IUCN Oil Palm Task Force. International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Mekong River Commission. (2022). Mekong low-flow and drought conditions in 2019–2021.

Mekong River Commission. (2024). State of the Mekong address 2024.

Mekong River Commission. (n.d.-a). Flood and drought.

Mekong River Commission. (n.d.-b). Hydropower.

Smith, C. H. (2014). Wallace, Darwin and Ternate 1858. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 68(2), 165–170.

United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. (2020). The human cost of disasters: An overview of the last 20 years, 2000–2019.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service. (2021). Oilseeds and products annual: Thailand.

World Wildlife Fund. (n.d.). Eight things to know about palm oil.