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Announcements
In order to facilitate better management of Southeast Asia’s transboundary Sesan, Sekong and Srepok (3S) river basin, the authors used the Freshwater Health Index (FHI) to diagnose the basin’s current and likely future level of freshwater health.
Sustainable water resource management is a wicked problem, fraught with uncertainties, an indeterminate scope, and divergent social values and interests among stakeholders. The authors used the Freshwater Health Index (FHI) with the conditions for December 2016 as a baseline, where Ecosystem Vitality and Ecosystem Services scored 66 and 80, respectively, out of a possible 100, while Governance & Stakeholders scored 43.
Thus, the 3S provided a range of desired ecosystem services, but there were signs of environmental stress as well as undeveloped water governance systems and limited stakeholder engagement. The authors also modeled four hydropower development scenarios and found that increasing development reduced the scores of a subset of indicators. This compromised the future ability of the 3S basin’s ecosystem to provide its current range of services. The FHI helped identify data deficiencies, illuminated important social dynamics, made ecosystem–human–water dynamics more understandable to stakeholders, and examined the long-term dynamics of the basin.
SEI report / Sediment carriage and deposition in the Mekong River have been altered in part by infrastructure development, riverbed mining and climate change.
Other publication / This book is a set of multi-country empirical case studies exploring the development challenges in the Mekong Region in the context of climate change.
Perspective / The tragedy of the Xepian-Xe Nam hydropower dam collapse in Laos is an opportunity to reflect on how transforming development can reduce disaster risk.
Design and development by Soapbox.
