New conservation study says Samet visitors would pay real money to protect the island
The study suggests Samet's conservation politics may have more public financial room than officials often assume.
Environment
Oil, reefs, plastics, waste and the environmental systems that determine whether the island can absorb its own popularity.
Map Ta Phut keeps growing, and so does the shadow it casts over Samet
The coast that sells escape is still being engineered for heavier petrochemical traffic.
Koh Samet is declared safe, then the data and the second leak muddy the picture again
Official safety declarations mattered, but so did the evidence that the surrounding coastal system remained unsettled.
Samet SOS as the slick drifts toward Ao Phrao and the island's worst memory
The closer the slick came to Ao Phrao, the more the 2022 response looked like a direct confrontation with the island's 2013 scar tissue.
A new Rayong oil spill threatens the recovery Samet never fully trusted anyway
The 2022 spill mattered so much because Samet did not experience it as a new crisis. It experienced it as the return of an old one.
During shutdown, Samet starts talking like a park again
The lockdown briefly allowed the island to present itself through ecology instead of nightlife and weekend volume.
Upcycling year three proves Samet cleanup has become a ritual, not a novelty
The third anniversary mattered because repetition is the real test of whether an environmental campaign has substance.
Samet's no-foam, no-plastic push turns eco language into a pier checkpoint
The real test of Samet's plastic politics was whether tourists felt rules, not slogans, when they landed.
A global ocean-plastic campaign chooses Koh Samet as its Thai launch point
The project tried to turn marine waste into a cleaner tourism story. Samet's challenge was always whether that story could outlast the photo opportunity.
A bivalve study shows the spill left traces beyond the beachfront memory
The shoreline may recover in public. The organisms underneath keep their own records.