"Land governance has become attached to environmental agendas in a number of ways. The best recognised of these is the cordoning off of forest land for conservation in national parks and other protected areas. In many parts of the Mekong Region, this has become an issue where conservation zones have been declared in areas previously settled, criminalising the largely ethnic minority farmers who find themselves living in such areas. More recently, "green grabbing" has become an issue as environmentally-inspired programs such as REDD+ assign recoverable value in forest carbon and hence give new incentives to acquire rights to forest land that is part of the livelihood domain of smallholders. Other environment-related issues include the pressures places on lowlands - especially delta areas - by climate change, the damage done to soils by industrial agriculture, and the environmental externalities of modern practices that impact on nearby smallholders.....Key trends and dynamics: Environmental protections in the Mekong region are frequently threatened by commodity markets. Most directly, an interest in timber products can lead to illegal deforestation, such as in a multimillion dollar smuggling industry in luxury rosewood to China (Environmental Investigation Agency 2014; Global Witness 2015; Singh 2013), and wood from around Indochina that is processed in 2 Vietnam to feed demand for cheap furniture in Europe and the US (Environmental Investigation Agency 2011; Environmental Investigation Agency and Telepak 2008). Commodification and associated crop booms place more indirect pressure on forests, such as in the expansion of rubber in the 2000s due to high prices, and the rise of tissue-culture banana in northern Myanmar since 2015 (Hayward et al. 2020). For example, in Lao PDR an estimated 14.43% of natural forest was converted to plantation forest between 2010-2017 (Wang et al. 2019). In Cambodia, nearly half of the concessions given out from 2000-2012 were forested in 2000, and there have been higher rates of deforestation within concession areas than in other areas (Davis et al. 2015). Some ELCs encroach into protected forest areas and wildlife sanctuaries (Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association 2014). In Thailand, Zheng et al. (Zeng, Gower, and Wood 2018) identify forest loss in the northern province of Nan due to increases in maize production. There are other knock-on effects from timber extraction. The combination of deforestation and intensified agriculture, particularly monocropping, contributes to soil and landscape degradation (Lestrelin 2010). The shift to industrialised farming stresses freshwater ecosystems, threatening their ability to provide for agriculture and food security (Johnston et al. 2010; Thomas et al. 2012). A further linkage ties deforestation with concerns over the impacts of climate change. In particular, the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters impact upon farmer strategies. An example is found in the aftermath of the 2011 floods in Thailand, and the resulting shift in crop choices (Panichvejsunti et al. 2018). Environmental disasters can also create new precarities in land tenure. Following the 2004 tsunami, there has been significant dispossession of land for indigenous communities in the south of Thailand (Neef et al. 2018). The industrialised use of water in the region is having a profound impact upon supported ecosystems, including communities living in proximity to water sources or courses. Nowhere is this more apparent to see than in the plight of the Mekong, no longer a free-flowing but a humanmanaged river due to the extensive number of hydropower projects interrupting its route from China to Vietnam, with plans afoot for numerous further projects. Each venture has considerable environmental costs, both individually and cumulatively, with communities forcibly displaced to make way for new dams. A further threat to water provisions sees large-scale infrastructure projects on wetlands surrounding cities that provide a vital filtering service to waste-water. Contentious examples are the construction of Suvarnabhumi International Airport on the Cobra Swamp on the outskirts of Bangkok, and projects on That Luang Marsh in Vientiane. Meanwhile, a number of lakes in and around Phnom Penh have been filled in to create land for commercial developments. In the context of urbanisation processes, a lack of coordinated land use planning is creating a platform for precarity against environment disasters. Beringer and Kaewsuk (Beringer and Kaewsuk 2018) show how infrastructure development is increasing the risk of flooding risks in Khon Kaen city, northern Thailand. Climate-change mitigation policies in Myanmar, combined with resource investment through concessions and other large-scale land acquisitions, are creating overlapping disputes on land. In Myanmar, this exacerbates rather than alleviates tensions within the peace process (Woods 2015). Work and Thuon (Work and Thuon 2017) note how in Prey Lang, Cambodia, industrial tree plantations qualify as forest restoration, and local communities are unable to access areas of land around ELCs that have been mapped as protection zones. A key strategy to identify and address drivers of deforestation and degradation, and incorporate them into climate change mitigation, has been the UN-backed REDD program in its various iterations (Broadhead and Izquierdo 2010). There are concerns that REDD projects are re-centralising forest management as opposed to promoting decentralised governance that can more easily strengthen local resource tenure security (Baird 2014). Claims on forest carbon are reorienting power relations and property rights in forest areas, potentially creating new fields for dispute (Mahanty et al. 2013). Such programs are also seen to justify and help promote commercial farming. For example, the promotion of rubber plantations by the Vietnamese government is aligned with REDD+ and Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) programmes (To Xuan Phuc and Tran Huu Nghi 2014b). However, Work (Work 2015) shows how REDD carbon-capture programs in Cambodia are being restricted due to a monopoly on the timber trade by domestic elites. Rather than compound tenure issues, there is evidence that for REDD schemes to be successful, they first need to directly address potential areas of dispute, otherwise deforestation may continue. Bourgoin and Castella (Bourgoin and Castella 2011) provide an example of such a process in the use of participatory land use planning as part of a REDD project in northern Lao PDR. Approaching the topic from a different angle, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) recognise that strong support for the tenure of vulnerable and marginalised people can also help protect them from the impacts of climate change, including climate-induced displacement (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2012)..."