Assoc Prof Edward Park Delivers Keynote at ICENR 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City

Delegates at the plenary session of ICENR 2026.

Assoc Prof Edward Park, Head of the Humanities and Social Studies Education (HSSE) Department at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Principal Investigator at NTU’s Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), delivered a keynote address at the 6th VNU-HCM International Conference on Environment and Natural Resources (ICENR 2026) on 2 November 2026. Held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, under the theme “Green Transition for Sustainable Development”, the conference marked the 30th anniversary of the Institute for Environment and Resources, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM). 

Assoc Prof Edward Park delivering his keynote at ICENR 2026.

Titled “Sand Mining in the Anthropocene”, the keynote focused on two recent landmark publications from his team: a global review of river sand and gravel mining in Reviews of Geophysics, which synthesised 411 studies and set out pathways for sustainable management (Park et al., 2026), and a Science Advances study showing that sand mining is a key driver of Mekong Delta destabilisation, exceeding natural sediment supply by six to 15 times (Kumar et al., 2026). He discussed how these findings can inform more sustainable sand management in the Mekong and in river systems worldwide. 

Assoc Prof Edward Park sharing his team’s recent riverbed topography survey results in the Mekong River. 

Assoc Prof Park also met Vietnamese academic partners to discuss future collaboration, including postgraduate student exchange and student and faculty visiting programmes. The discussions aim to strengthen Mekong Delta research, a long-term focus of the NTU Tropical Rivers Group (TRG). 

References 

1) Park, E., Hackney, C. R., Tran, D. D., Bendixen, M., Best, J., Yuen, K. W., Runeckles, H., Chyon, M. S. A., Kästner, K., Kumar, S., Yusuf, H., Lamb, V., Iversen, L. L., Spiller, A., Sinha, R., da Silva, E. F., Alcantara, E., Wu, C., . . . Switzer, A. D. (2026). River sand and gravel mining: Global drivers, impacts, and pathways for sustainable management. Reviews of Geophysics, 64(3), e2024RG000868. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024RG000868 

2) Kumar, S., Park, E., Tran, D. D., Vo, T. Q., Kästner, K., Kantoush, S., Doan, V. B., Huang, J., Wang, J., & Switzer, A. D. (2026). Counterfactual modeling isolates sand mining impacts, revealing it as a key driver of Mekong Delta destabilization. Science Advances, 12(28), eaef0558. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aef0558