Lecture 11 - Water and development in Southeast Asia

Lecture: The interlinkages of water and development in Southeast Asia: The Mekong River case
Olli Varis
Helsinki University of Technology

Article: Water Resources Development and Impact Assessment in the Mekong Basin: Which Way to Go?
Marko Keskinen, Ambio, Vol 37, No 3, 193-198

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The lecture presented key issues of water management as they relate to development generally and the Mekong region in particular. The lecture was delivered in the old-fashioned professorial style; lots of information but somehow the thread of the talk was difficult to follow, particularly how the last section on modern Lao and Cambodia related to water issues. But I liked the photos.

Globally, water management faces challenges related to:

• food supply and agriculture (especially in view of rapid urbanization)
• health (water-borne diseases a key cause of mortality and morbidity)
• energy (bio-energy and hydropower)
• environmental management (global – climate change; local/regional – biodiversity, wetland degradation)and natural catastrophes (floods and droughts).

The Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) model neatly encapsulated the combination of environmental, economic and social concerns within a framework of good governance and stakeholder participation.

Water management of the Mekong river area is made complicated by the monsoon rainfall pattern and the fact that the river flows through six countries; overlapping jurisdictions both between nations and within nations make management difficult. This point is stressed by Koskinen, who notes that various impact assessments suffer from a lack of co-ordination – no one body has a clear overview of all the water-related projects in the Mekong region and how they relate one to another.

An interesting question posed by the lecturer was why the upper reaches of the Mekong are so sparsely populated compared with other similar water basins. The region is on the border between the Indian and Chinese cultural spheres, and regions on the periphery tend to be less heavily populated (cf. Finnish population densities, where a third of the population lives in or around the Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa metropolitan area) but I would agree with the lecturer that in view of the fertility of the land it is a surprising situation. I have no answer except to speculate that maybe the local culture did not value business and consequently no urban areas grew up that could act as magnets for population growth. Economic activity would then move downstream, with the upper areas acting as a source of raw materials.

My experience of urban areas of peninsular Malaysia leads me to think that the biggest problems with water management are flooding (because of unbridled construction connected with rapid urbanization) and waste management and waste-water treatment. Waterways are treated as sewers and the attitude of manufacturing industries to environmental issues is rather cavalier, with an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach. I am, however, optimistic since waterways recover, for example water quality in western Europe is much better than it was in the past and the Rhine river, for instance, recovered from the Schweizerhalle catastrophe (1986) quite quickly, and Asians are becoming increasingly aware of environmental issues.

Scientific knowledge in the field is also progressing – I recently heard about bioprecipitation, rain-making plant bacteria, which since different crops seem to harbour different quantities of such bacteria might suggest that cropping patterns could affect rainfall patterns; an important finding in view of the monoculture farming in many parts of the world.

Water is fundamental to mankind, and I enjoyed the lecture.