Study: Vietnam Will No Longer Be Able To Mitigate Saltwater Intrusion In Mekong Delta By 2050
A new study has identified 2050 as the tipping point by which stakeholders in the Mekong Delta will no longer be able to mitigate the issue of saltwater intrusion, which has already devastated agriculture in parts of Vietnam’s leading rice-producing region. The study, led by Sepehr Eslami, a senior researcher and adviser at Deltares, a Dutch consultancy, argues that the biggest causes behind the issue are currently anthropogenic, but by 2050 climate change will likely play the bigger role, putting the issue into the hands of global cooperation.
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The study comes as the culmination of 12 years of research within Rise and Fall, a project at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Deltares, Eslami says. Two earlier papers authored under the project established, for the first time, a conclusive causal link between anthropogenic sediment starvation — which is when sediment that would normally float downstream is blocked — and saltwater intrusion.
Prior to that, despite early warnings in the early 21st century, extreme salt intrusion was most commonly linked to sea level rise and climate change. Eslami authored one of these papers in 2019, which showed that in the past 20 years, climate change had accounted for less than 5% of the challenges facing the Mekong Delta, and tied the issue of increasing salinity to sediment starvation due to both upstream hydropower development and downstream sand mining.
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The impact of seawater intrusion has already been devastating for parts of the Mekong Delta, particularly since so much of its population lives off the land. Farmers are seeing entire crops or ponds full of produce fail because of limited fresh water, putting their livelihoods into serious question. The issue was brought to a head in 2019 and extending into 2020, when a serious drought hit during an alarming period of prolonged salinity, pushing farmers into desperate situations. In Ben Tre, a province that traditionally does not see much saline intrusion, salt levels were high enough to kill entire fields of trees. Ben Tre fruit farmer Vo Thanh Soi says he can no longer grow the fruit he has nurtured for generations because of the impact salt had on his crops that year. “All my crops including durian and rambutan died. I could not save a single one,” he said by phone.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/07/study-puts-2050-deadline-on-tipping-point-for-mekong-delta-salinity/
