Sustainability of Environmental Regimes: The Mekong River Commission

Affeltranger, Bastien

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-68488-6_43

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…It becomes obvious that the MRC is still struggling to be accepted as an institutional framework for assessing and managing the freshwater resources, and as a political forum for deciding on water related issues. 1065 The most likely reason for this is the reluctance of the member states to fully delegate certain powers to the MRC -in fear of cutting back their own national sovereignty. Hence, the MRC can formulate policies and recommendations, but their implementation still lies in the hands of the national governments.…”

Section: The Mekong Rivermentioning

confidence: 99%

International Water Law and the Quest for Common Security

Magsig¹

2015

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Section: The Mekong Rivermentioning

confidence: 99%

International Water Law and the Quest for Common Security

Magsig¹

2015

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“…The Mekong agreement aims to achieve sustainable development through the real-time sharing of data and information for planning and monitoring purposes, but information-sharing is limited [31,32]. Moreover, the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) has been noted to have a limited monitoring framework and is also ineffective in data and information sharing [31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systems Analysis of Coupled Natural and Human Processes in the Mekong River Basin

2021

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The Mekong River Basin is one of the world’s major transboundary basins. The hydrology, agriculture, ecology, and other watershed functions are constantly changing as a result of a variety of human activities carried out inside and by neighboring countries including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in order to meet increased food and water demands for an increasing population. The Mekong River, which provides irrigation and fishing for a population of over 60 million people, also has an estimated 88,000 MW of untapped hydropower potential. The construction of dams for energy supply has a wide-ranging impact on downstream reservoir regions, resulting in unprecedented changes in hydrologic functions, the environment, and people’s livelihoods. We present a holistic view of how external stressors such as climate change and variability, land cover, and land-use change affect supply and demand. We present an integrated modeling framework for analyzing the supply–demand scenarios and tradeoffs between different sectors. Specifically, we evaluated the impacts of future climate on irrigation, hydropower, and other needs in the basin through a feedback loop. We focused on hydrologic extremes to evaluate their impacts on the reservoir operations during flood and low flow events. The inflow is projected to change by +13% to −50% in the future, while a 0.25% (15.24 billion m3) reduction is projected for the net irrigation water requirement (NIWR). A unit percentage increase in irrigation demand will reduce energy generation by 0.15%, but climate change has a beneficial impact on dam performance with a predicted increase in energy generation and supply to all sectors. Flood events will cause excessive stress on reservoir operation to handle up to six times more flow volumes; however, the low-flow events will marginally affect the system. While the flow and storage rule curves consider both supply and demand, changing human water use comes second to changing climate or other biophysical considerations. This paper emphasizes the importance of considering feedback between climate–water–human society in the systems modeling framework in order to meet societal and ecological challenges. The findings will provide information on the risks and tradeoffs that exist in the water, energy, and food sectors of the basin.

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“…There are plans to build 16 main stem and 110 tributary dams by 2030 [17,18]. The underdeveloped condition of the MRB in terms of river impoundments [19] and the sensitivity of the dam operation information are the fundamental cause of the lack of archived data sets in the region [20][21][22][23]. Most of the studies are performed through hydrological models, with remote sensing data merely used as forcing inputs for simulations [8,24,25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deriving the Reservoir Conditions for Better Water Resource Management Using Satellite-Based Earth Observations in the Lower Mekong River Basin

Ali

Sridhar

2019

Remote Sensing

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The Mekong River basin supported a large population and ecosystem with abundant water and nutrient supply. However, the impoundments in the river can substantially alter the flow downstream and its timing. Using limited observations, this study demonstrated an approach to derive dam characteristics, including storage and flow rate, from remote-sensing-based data. Global Reservoir and Lake Monitor (GRLM), River-Lake Hydrology (RLH), and ICESat-GLAS, which generated altimetry from Jason series and inundation areas from Landsat 8, were used to estimate the reservoir surface area and change in storage over time. The inflow simulated by the variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model from 2008 to 2016 and the reservoir storage change were used in the mass balance equation to calculate outflows for three dams in the basin. Estimated reservoir total storage closely resembled the observed data, with a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency and coefficient of determination more than 0.90 and 0.95, respectively. An average decrease of 55% in outflows was estimated during the wet season and an increase of up to 94% in the dry season for the Lam Pao. The estimated decrease in outflows during the wet season was 70% and 60% for Sirindhorn and Ubol Ratana, respectively, along with a 36% increase in the dry season for Sirindhorn. Basin-wide demand for evapotranspiration, about 935 mm, implicitly matched with the annual water diversion from 1000 to 2300 million m3. From the storage–discharge rating curves, minimum storage was also evident in the monsoon season (June–July), and it reached the highest in November. This study demonstrated the utility of remote sensing products to assess the impacts of dams on flows in the Mekong River basin.

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Sustainability of Environmental Regimes: The Mekong River Commission

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

International Water Law and the Quest for Common Security

International Water Law and the Quest for Common Security

Systems Analysis of Coupled Natural and Human Processes in the Mekong River Basin

Deriving the Reservoir Conditions for Better Water Resource Management Using Satellite-Based Earth Observations in the Lower Mekong River Basin

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