What worries many scientists is that ... many places now experience weather conditions beyond anything local ecosystems - or indeed human communities - have evolved to endure.
--Justin Rowlett, BBC
Those old enough to remember the Vietnam War will remember the Mekong Delta, the incredibly fertile expanse where the mighty river empties into the South China Sea. But the river is more than that. From headwaters high in the Tibetan plateau, it winds 2,700 miles through China’s Yunnan Province and four Southeast Asian countries, depositing fertile silt and hosting an incredible variety and volume of fish. At the nearest point to where I live, about half way, it’s already wider than a mile, think of the Mississippi. A few hundred miles further downstream it feeds the largest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle Sap, in Cambodia. The lake fills and empties like a pulsating heart with the seasonal surge and fall of the Mekong. Thus nourished, the lake yields a yearly catch of half a million tons of fish and provides most of Cambodia’s protein.
Me is “mother”, kong is an archaic word for river: the Mekong is the mother of rivers and the pulsing artery sustaining millions. And the mighty Mekong, the Mother of Rivers, is dying.
Following droughts in 2016 and 2019, the river dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded, and last year Tonle Sap, with the Mekong only barely managing a rise, much less a months-long surge, yielded only a tenth of the usual catch, with many fish only large enough to use for fish feed. Rice yields were down, threatened not only by drought but by the failure of sediment as the seasonal pulse weakened over the years. The Delta, over which so much blood was shed in my youth, is further stressed by salinization from rising sea levels. The livelihoods, and food security, of millions are at risk.
We live too far from the Mekong to be directly affected, but can attest to the reality of the heat and drought. The hot season of 2016 was so intense that there were no mosquitoes; water remaining in ponds was scalding to the touch and killed the larvae. Last year, the monsoons started a little late (after ending early the previous year) but with just the right amount of rain for planting, giving the rice a good start without drowning the shoots. Then it stopped. Rice, once it’s tall enough, does well in standing water and the weeds do poorly—and vice-versa—so that when the rains failed to flood the fields, the weeds took over while the rice withered. There had never been such a bad year, the old-timers said. Then in August, a series of storms brought catastrophic flooding. Rice on higher ground drank eagerly and recovered, but vast expanses on lower ground drowned and rotted during the weeks of runoff, the stench spoiling my morning bike rides. Still, the harvest was adequate and no one starved. Where we are, this year is shaping up as a repeat:
The rice got a good start, then the rains stopped and the weeds are growing green and lush, thriving while the rice that isn’t completely crowded out is looking thin and peaked.
There isn’t yet enough data available to say much about SE Asia as a whole.
(Yet, as I write, a third of Bangladesh is under water. Climate change brings not a smooth warming trend, but bizarre weather as atmospheric homeostasis is broken and the whole system oscillates out of control.)
But, climate change isn’t the only culprit. The other chokehold is hydroelectric dams. China has built eleven massive dams on the upper Mekong and downstream countries have long complained that they are hogging the flow. China has just as long claimed to be a good neighbor, maintaining adequate flow and issuing advance alerts of storing and releasing, of course, denying any responsibility for the crisis of 2019. Skepticism was confirmed early this year when satellite imagery examined by Eyes on Earth showed that the reservoirs behind China’s dams were filling to the brim with unusually heavy rainfall while rain-starved farmers and fishers downstream were met with a trickle instead of the expected surging pulse. The expectation is that, this year, China, chastened, will be, or is, releasing flows.
China alone isn’t to blame, however. Landlocked impoverished Lao* has been on a crash program to become the “battery of Southeast Asia”, building dams on tributaries and even the Mekong itself, generating power for sale to its neighbors. Besides water, the dams choke off the seasonal flow of sediment essential to the fertility of the Mekong basin and obstruct the migration of fish that makes the river home to over 1000 known species (and dolphins!). Much of this development is financed by China as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, but corporations from Thailand and Vietnam are also helping to finance the very dams their countries complain about. Those countries, of course are also eager to purchase the power. Even Cambodia, perhaps the most seriously affected so far, succumbed to dam-building fever before declaring a moratorium last year.
What to do? The region is developing and modernizing rapidly. People want electric light, refrigerators, television, internet, air conditioning. They want movies and air-conditioned shopping malls. And they will have them. And all that takes power. And that presents something of a paradox: the very advances that the people demand threatens their survival in ways piled on top of, and more immediate than, climate change. I hope to discuss ideas for resolving the paradox in a subsequent diary.
But also, China’s management of its upper Mekong dams is another of several missteps in what is intended to be the charm offensive accompanying the Belt and Road Initiative. Discussing that too must await another diary.
*Lao Peoples Democratic Republic. The “s” in “Laos” probably began as a clerical error in Paris during the colonial days; it’s an impossible construction in the language itself.
Further Reading
Science Shows Chinese Dams Devastating Mekong River,
by Brien Eyler, Foreign Policy
Mekong dams destroy Tonle Sap Lake,
By Tyler Roney, The Third Pole
In the Mekong, a Confluence of Calamities,
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy, 28 April 2020
Southeast Asia’s most critical river is entering uncharted waters,
Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic
Lao branching into coal:
Development dilemma: How did coal sneak into Laos' energy plans?
By Tim Ha. Eco-business, 16 July 2020