Mongabay - David Brown
- Scientists say the 1-meter sea level
rise expected by century's end will displace 3.5-5 million Mekong Delta
residents. A 2-meter sea level rise could force three times that to
higher ground.
- Shifting rainfall and flooding patterns are also
threatening one of the most highly productive agricultural environments
in the world.
- The onus is now on Vietnam's government in Hanoi to approve a comprehensive adaptation and mitigation plan.
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| A boat plies a waterway in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. No delta region in the world is more threatened by climate change. Will Vietnam act in time to save it? Photo by LisArt/Flickr |
It's a sad fact that several decades of
talk about climate change have hardly anywhere yet led to serious
efforts to adapt to phenomena that are virtually unavoidable.
Neuroscientists say that's because we're humans. We aren't wired to
respond to large, complex, slow-moving threats. Our
instinctive response is apathy, not action.
That paradox was much on my mind
during a recent visit back to Vietnam's fabulously fertile Mekong Delta,
a soggy plain the size of Switzerland. Here the livelihood of 20
percent of Vietnam's 92 million people is gravely threatened by climate
change and by a manmade catastrophe, the seemingly unstoppable damming
of the upper reaches of the Mekong River.
Samuel Johnson famously said that
"nothing concentrates the mind so well as the prospect of imminent
hanging." It's been nine years since a
World Bank study
singled out the Mekong Delta as one of the places on our planet that is
most gravely threatened by sea level rise. There if anywhere, I
imagined, I'd find a sense of urgency. I'd find adaptive measures well
advanced.
I was wrong. Vietnamese government
ministries, provincial administrations, experts from Vietnamese
universities and thinktanks, experts deployed by the World Bank, the
Asian Development Bank and foreign governments: all have been pushing
plans and policies. The problem has been to sort out the best ideas,
make appropriate decisions and find the resources needed to implement
them in a timely, coherent way.
Things may be coming together at last,
I concluded after talking with dozens of local officials, professors,
journalists and farmers in mid-June. None denied the reality of the
problem. Many connected the question of what to do about climate change
to older arguments over the best ways to grow more and better crops.
Some of my interlocutors expected that
Vietnam's new government will reveal its strategy toward the end of
2016. They hope Hanoi will get it right. Vietnam's a single-party state.
Once a policy is adopted and handed down from the top, it isn't easy to
change direction. However, if the
prescriptions just don't make sense in the 13 Delta provinces, the
party/state's local representatives can just fail to follow through.
In Vietnam it's common to find unmotivated officials carrying out
Hanoi's prescriptions in a formal way, without conviction and, at the
end of the day, without much result.
Because the stakes are so high, let's assume that there's only one correct answer: that in the next several months, Hanoi will approve a comprehensive mitigation and adaptation plan for the 13 Delta provinces, and the provinces will like it enough to carry it out. Anything less would be a terrible result.
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| Left: The Mekong River and its watershed. The river originates in the
Tibetan Plateau of China, where it is known as the Lancang River; it
then proceeds through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Right: The lower Mekong basin. Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Penprapa
Wut/Wikimedia Commons |
A precarious prosperity
The Mekong Delta's average elevation
is less than 2 meters above sea level. Much of it is perfectly suited to
growing rice. Farmers in the Delta also produce fruit, coconuts, river
fish and shrimp. Their abundant harvests are made possible by annual
flooding and by an intricate network of canals, dams and sluices.
It's a highly engineered environment, a
modern hydraulic society based on intensive farming and infrastructure
that deflects floods, limits saline intrusion, facilitates river
transport and aquaculture, and furnishes the right amount of fresh water
for irrigation.
It wasn't always like this, of course.
When Vietnamese settlers first moved into the Delta some 300 years ago,
they found a wild landscape shaped by a monsoon climate, typhoons and
tides and the Mekong's annual flood. Imperial officials, and later
French colonial engineers, mobilized tens of thousands of pioneers to
dig canals and drainage ditches. As time passed, much of the
infrastructural work was mechanized. Decades of insurgency slowed the
taming of the Delta but even the years of the "American War" were marked
by land reform and the introduction of so-called "miracle rice" —
strains that could double harvests provided that irrigation water
levels, pesticides and nutrients were carefully managed.
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| A heli door gunner over the Mekong Delta in 1967. Photo by manhhai/Flickr |
The officials who came south after the
collapse of the Saigon government in 1975 were intent on reforming
agriculture Soviet style, as they'd done in the Red River Delta far to
the north. Collectivization didn't work very well, however. Farmers
refused to tend collective plots with the same care they'd put into
growing crops on their own land. Ten years later, Hanoi conceded the
failure of central planning, redistributed agricultural land in
family-sized plots and allowed small private businesses to operate
alongside state-owned enterprises.
These so-called "doi moi" reforms
ushered in a quarter century of astonishing growth in Vietnam's economy.
For the Mekong Delta, loans and grants from Western countries funded
repair and extension of the water management infrastructure. The
introduction of high-yielding rice varieties, expansion of rice lands
and emphasis on double and, in some places, triple cropping permitted a
rapid increase in rice production, from 7 million to 24 million tons of
paddy annually. Vietnam's integration into the global trading system
opened up markets for its rice and for new crops — in particular
pond-raised shrimp and catfish.
There were skeptics, of course, who
spoke up to doubt the sustainability of unprecedented prosperity. Some
academics questioned the wisdom of an unremitting focus on rice
monoculture. They noted that in districts no longer subject to annual
flooding, ever-increasing quantities of pesticides and chemical
fertilizer are needed to sustain good harvests. Some farmers complained
that the state-owned Vietnam Southern Food Corporation was getting an
unfair share of profits from marketing the rice they grew. As the
country's food economy shifted from scarcity to surplus, Hanoi's
continued emphasis on "food security" — meaning, in the Delta, reserving
more than half of its arable land exclusively for rice — seemed increasingly anachronistic.
Still, as food production and exports
climbed year after year, it was possible to imagine that prosperity
would be permanent in the Mekong Delta. It was only necessary to wish
away the warnings of climate change researchers, the huge dams under
construction upstream, and the persistently low incomes of the farmers
who grew the rice.
Alarm gongs: the future is already happening
For years, Duong Van Ni and his
colleagues at Can Tho University have been educating anyone who'll
listen about the changes in store for the Mekong Delta. The data's there
and it's persuasive.
On an afternoon in mid-June, as
monsoon rain pounded the tin roof of a cafe near campus, Professor Ni
walked me through the scenario that staff of the University's DRAGON
(Delta Research and Global Observation Network) Institute have built and
presented to countless audiences. It integrates over 100 years of
hydrological and climate data with geographic information system and
remote-sensing data contributed by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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| A NASA satellite image of the Mekong Delta. |
No delta area, not the mouths of the Ganges, the Nile or the
Mississippi, is more vulnerable than the Mekong estuary to the
predictable impacts of climate change. The 1-meter sea level rise
expected by the end of the 21st century, all else being equal, will
displace 3.5-5 million people. If the sea instead rose by 2 meters,
lacking effective countermeasures, some 75 percent of the Delta's 18
million inhabitants would be forced to move to higher ground.
Already, said Professor Ni, there's
been a significant decrease in rainfall in the first part of the annual
rainy season, and more rain toward the end. The Mekong's annual flood
peak has fallen by a third since 2000. The waters from upstream carry
less silt to replenish the Delta floodplain. Also, the volume of fresh
water is falling while the sea level rises. This allows salt-laden tidal
water to penetrate further and further into Delta estuaries and swampy
coastal areas during the dry season.
Modeling of current trends suggest
that average temperatures in the Mekong Delta will rise by more than 3
degrees Celsius toward the end of the century. Annual rainfall will
decrease during the first half of the century, and then rise well above
the 20th century average. The area that's flooded each autumn won't
change substantially, but the floods won't last as long.
All things being equal, rice yields
will plummet as temperatures rise. Lighter rains in the early months of
the wet season will challenge farmers' ingenuity. Rising seas and
reduced river flows will severely test the system of sea dikes.
Riverbanks and the Delta coast are already crumbling; this will
accelerate. Farmers who are unable to cope will head north to seek
industrial and construction jobs.
That's not all. At slide 70 (of 86) of
the DRAGON presentation, attention shifts to upstream dam construction
on Delta water regimes. For China,
Laos and Thailand, the hydroelectric potential of the upper Mekong is a
seemingly irresistable development opportunity. It may be that not all
the dams they plan will be built across the Mekong mainstream. Whether a
few or many, their impact on agriculture in Vietnam and Cambodia will
be profoundly negative, Professor
Ni, his colleagues at Can Tho University, and experts at other
institutes in southern Vietnam have pounded the alarm gongs for years.
The dam cascade is a nearer and more present danger, and apparently just
as unstoppable as climate change.
DRAGON Institute's slideshow concludes
with a call to action. The future is bleak but not hopelessly so if
appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies are launched. What the
Delta needs is revealed: sustainable development based on a triply
effective foundation of water source security, food security and social
security.
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