Who Will Save Asia’s Mekong River?

Researchers turn to international cooperation to save Asia’s 7′th longest river.

Urbanization, growing slums, intensive farming, damming, and warring political ideologies are just a few of the hurdles that researchers from Helsinki University of Technology will need to overcome to protect the Mekong River, one of the most important water sources in Southeast Asia.

Luckily, they have a plan. To save the river, researchers have developed what they are calling the ‘3E principle’: the idea that “waters should be used to provide economic well-being to the people, without compromising social equity and environmental sustainability.”

Putting this principle into practice means working closely with each of the countries that benefits from the Mekong River (China and Tibet, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) to safeguard the river’s life-giving water.

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The goal: Integrated Water Resource Management, or IWRM.

IWRM is an integrated approach that revolves around the researcher’s 3E’s: economy, equity, and environment.

The brainchild of the 1992 Dublin International Conference on Water and Environment, IWRM is an approach that holistically encourages the participation of stakeholders and government throughout the entire water drainage basin.

Thus far, the results of the applying IWRM have been three workshops, dubbed Mekong at the Crossroads. The workshops have been held in different countries in Southeast Asia. The first workshop, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, gauged the current knowledge about the environment, governance, and other broad issues. The second, held in Vientiane, Laos, worked to undue widespread myths of sustainable water management. The last, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, collected 26 peer-review scientific journals on issues surrounding the Mekong River.

Source: ‘Mekong at the Crossroads,’ Ambio, 2008, Vol. 37(3) [PDF] via Ambio.

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Image credit: Wikipedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License.

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