The swirling currents of the once mighty Mekong shrunk by drought and increasingly crippled by dams point towards an unprecedented crisis of water governance along the more than 4,900 kilometers of southeast Asia’s longest river.
“This is the worst ecological disaster in history of the Mekong,” declared Chainarong Setthachua, natural resources expert at Thailand’s Maha Sarakham University. “It should be a massive wakeup call for policymakers and leaders of the region.” After the July drought and the lowest water levels in more than a hundred years, water levels have still not recovered. “The water in the Mekong River has fallen to a critical level. Sand islands are now exposed along many sections of the waterway,” the Bangkok Post reported in October.
The Mekong has long enchanted explorers, travelers and researchers. In more recent times, it has become the focus of commercial interests dominated by the exploitation of hydropower and sand mining. China embarked on a massive dam program with 11 dams already operating on the Upper Mekong. A recent study, published in Nature, documented “unprecedented changes due to the recent acceleration in large-scale dam construction.” While Chinese hydropower expansion attracts most attention, Thailand has also played a role in building dams and the Lao government is currently celebrating completion of the huge 1285-megawatt Xayaburi.
At risk is the world’s largest inland fisheries, providing food security and livelihoods for 60 million people living downstream among the four member states of the Mekong River Commission – Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, reports have long maintained.
Proliferating dams trap the sediment essential to the delta’s healthy survival. Inadequate water flow and loss of layers of nutrient-rich sediment that historically traveled downstream, combined with increasingly extreme weather and seawater steadily pushing inland, cause the delta to sink. The sinking is worsened by increasing extraction of groundwater to meet irrigation needs of Vietnam’s rice basket. Wetlands expert Nguyen Thu Thien predicts dire consequences, suggesting hydro electric energy could instigate regional instability: “Vietnam could lose the delta as its rice-bowl by 2050. Impoverished millions will be forced to flee, if all the dams go ahead.” Of course, forced migration will cause destabilization.
As if this was not enough of a worry, latest analysis of satellite data predict disappearance of the Mekong Delta under rising seas. Bruce Shoemaker, author of Dead in the Water, which examines the Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos, explains the scientific consensus is that costs outweigh benefits and the project represents “complete failure of water governance in Mekong region.”
Obstacles: Hydroelectric dams are weakening the mighty Mekong River (Source: Mekong River Commission Strategic Environment Assessment and International Rivers Organization)
More than 40 dams have been installed in the Laos area of the Mekong, with eight more planned after Xayaburi, including one 30 kilometers from the world heritage site of Luang Prabang. The country, the poorest of the four member states of the Mekong River Commission with GDP per capita of about $2,500 per year, insists that hydropower is necessary to reduce poverty. Economists warn that such huge infrastructure projects relying on foreign investment could drown such developing economies in debt, not to mention mass displacement of untold thousands of villagers and loss of livelihoods.
