On the afternoon of September 26, halfway through a session at Thammasat University, a flood alert lit up my phone.
Water in Bangkok’s canals had reached critical levels. The municipal message advised residents in low-lying districts along the Chao Phraya to secure their belongings on higher floors and prepare alternative travel routes. In any other setting, I might have swiped the banner away.
But I was sitting inside Mekong ASEAN Environmental Week (MAEW) 2026, surrounded by fishers, Indigenous organisers and hydrologists debating the systemic unravelling of Southeast Asian river basins.
MAEW 2026, held at Thammasat University from September 23 to 26, carried the theme “People’s Currents: From Local Resistance to Collective Power”.
The regional platform brings together frontline communities, civil society groups, researchers, youth, artists and others working around development, natural resources, and the social and environmental impacts of large-scale projects across the Mekong and Southeast Asia.
The very crisis pinned to the slide projector had just landed as a digitised ping in the palm of my hand.
For those of us arriving from Sikkim as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), the irony cut deep.
In our mountains, or anywhere else nowadays, warnings don’t always arrive with an automated ringtone. We learned that lesson brutally in October 2023, when the South Lhonak glacial lake burst its moraine dam, tearing through the Chungthang hydro dam and transforming the Teesta basin into a torrent of silt, pulverised concrete and displacement.
We saw it strike again across the border in Nepal, where catastrophic deluges broke riverbanks and inundated entire settlements. And even while sitting in Bangkok, our screens flickered with frantic updates from home: Rimbi, a quiet village in West Sikkim, was being ravaged by sudden, violent landslides as saturated slopes gave way.
What struck us almost immediately in Bangkok was the openness of the conversations — “Sawadeeka Environmental talks!”
Environmental questions were being discussed through panels, documentaries, theatre, storytelling, exhibitions and youth-led activities. People came from different landscapes carrying different experiences, yet many of the concerns sounded familiar: rivers, mountains, forests, food, livelihoods, pollution, development and the question of what happens when the systems around us begin to change.
Winona reflected on this openness afterwards: “We see issues being discussed openly, which we don’t have back at home.”
We need places where difficult environmental questions can be discussed openly, where people from different geographical regions can compare their experiences, and where communities can meet researchers, activists, artists and young people who may be facing related problems elsewhere.
For communities living beside a river, the river represents food, memory, culture and home, so any changes to it directly affect daily life. Because of this close relationship, community knowledge, alongside the active participation of women and youth, needs to be central to environmental decision-making and addressing the environmental crisis.
Gatherings such as Mekong–ASEAN Environmental Week provide a crucial platform for connecting local struggles to broader regional issues, allowing isolated community stories and challenges to be shared and carried collectively.
We were there representing the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), from India, bringing a small part of Dzongu’s story into this wider regional conversation.
Our presentation touched on the relationship between people, mountains and rivers, the Save Teesta movement, and the community knowledge that has helped people respond when modern systems fail.
At its heart was a simple question: “Development is important, but at what limit, what cost?” And another: “True progress is not about building more; it is about building responsibly.”
These questions belong far beyond Dzongu.
A fisherman watching a changing Mekong, a community defending a tributary in the Salween basin, and a village in Sikkim living alongside an altered Teesta may be facing different immediate realities.
Our rivers don’t recognise the political boundaries between countries. Pollution released upstream can travel downstream. Changes in water flows can affect communities far beyond the site of a dam. Mining, critical minerals, industrial waste and hydropower may appear as separate issues on paper, but their consequences eventually meet in the same watersheds.
There were also many different ways of telling environmental stories. Documentaries, theatre, games, storytelling, exhibitions, food, art and conversations all became ways of approaching the same larger questions. The conversations broadened our understanding of what transboundary really means, even across media.
As Winona put it, there were “so many ways to tell the story of one river that unite them all”.
At the closing ceremony, a theatre piece told the story of the last fish of the Mekong.
The story moved backward and forward through time. A grandmother and her grandchild shared memories around food. The fish became an unlikely hero. There was dancing, time travel, food influencers and a young delivery worker proudly carrying Thai food to customers.
It was funny. Then it became frightening.
The fish belonged to a future in which it had become almost impossible to encounter except through stories. What had once been ordinary food had become family memory.
A grandmother could remember its taste.
But as riverscapes change, her grandchild might never know it.
After days of discussing rivers as ecosystems, economies, territories and political struggles, the theatre piece reduced it all to something intimate: what happens when something ordinary disappears?
It’s amazing how our tech devices can tell us when water has crossed a threshold. They can tell us that the road ahead may soon be underwater and that we may need to move our belongings. But they cannot tell us everything that happened before the alert.
The river changing slowly. The fish disappearing quietly. The old crossing becoming unfamiliar. A ritual losing its meaning. A food becoming a memory. A community realising that the landscape it knew is becoming something else.
Those warnings are harder to receive.
The flood alert eventually vanished from my phone screen, the conference chairs were stacked, and the participants dispersed back to their respective basins.
The water, however, does not wait for our next regional coalition or five-year adaptation framework.
From Dzongu to Bangkok, whether choked by arsenic or concrete or destabilised by an unravelling climate, rivers will continue to push through whatever barriers we build around them.
Either we relearn to read the river and respect its limits, or the next alert we receive will simply be the sound of the water breaking through the walls.
The authors are writing in their capacity as Affected Citizens of Teesta, Sikkim, India.
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