Can the Mekong Delta Be Saved?
A difficult, but not impossible, task
Good morning! Welcome to the latest subscriber-only edition of the Vietnam Weekly. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription to receive future posts (and get access to all previous articles), you can do so below for US$5/month or US$50/year.
Today I’m returning to a topic that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and reporting on: the future of the Mekong Delta.
Last month, an international group of water/river experts published a commentary called ‘Save the Mekong Delta from drowning.’ (A version of it is linked here, but contact me if you’d like the full PDF.)
The piece presents - in no uncertain terms - the existential threat facing the region if the current reality persists: by 2100, up to 90% of the delta could sink below sea level. The region is currently home to 17 million people and accounts for up to 10% of all rice traded globally.
To clarify: below sea level doesn’t necessarily mean underwater, but as seen in places like the Netherlands or my home city of New Orleans, protecting land that is below sea level is enormously expensive.
We are already seeing this play out in Ca Mau, arguably the delta’s most exposed province, which is reportedly losing 400 hectares of coastal protective forest to erosion every year despite millions of dollars spent on dikes.
The authors present striking data to lay out the state of the delta: for example, at the start of the 20th century, the delta received up to 160 million metric tons of sediment each year from the Mekong River. Over half of that is now trapped in upstream dam reservoirs, and if all of the 130+ planned dams (both on the river’s mainstream and its tributaries) are built, 96% of the Mekong’s sediment will be trapped. This starves the delta of the very material that created it.
Here in Vietnam, upstream dams are often presented as the primary driver of the delta’s problems, but the authors describe a number of domestic drivers of subsidence too, most notably sand mining and groundwater extraction for agriculture and urban use.
They lay out a case that governments across the Mekong Basin need to go much deeper in their efforts to save the river and the delta it built: “Many initiatives have supported local adaptation measures to address symptoms of a sinking delta, but have not addressed underlying anthropogenic drivers of subsidence at both the delta and basin scales, nor considered the international nature of the basin.”
Let’s dig into a few of the above issues through the lens of recent media coverage.