We depart from Can Tho, the bustling coronary heart of Vietnam’s Mekong River delta, earlier than dawn, heading south to an aquaculture farm in coastal Cà Mau province. The farm, I’m advised, showcases how farmers within the delta are preserving scarce freshwater through the intensely scorching dry season.
A drive of a number of hours takes us by what is called the nation’s “rice bowl” and its aquaculture epicenter. Most hanging to a customer is how practically each inch of land right here is cultivated or constructed upon. Houses abut shrimp farms, and employees load Melaleuca tree trunks onto vehicles. Slim roads parallel a crisscross of canals constructed for irrigation and transportation.
However all is much from effectively in what, at first look, seems like an agricultural paradise. Many of the waterways are dried out, their mud bottoms uncovered and cracked. This isn’t uncommon within the dry season, however these fissures have grown extra seen with every passing yr, symbolizing the deepening fractures stressing this area, which is residence to twenty million folks.
Sand mining within the river and the blockage of important sediments by upstream dams, largely in China and Laos, have depleted the delta of its very constructing blocks, resulting in speedy subsidence. With the land sinking, hundreds of roads and buildings have buckled and collapsed. And as local weather change intensifies, rising sea ranges and decreased freshwater flows will pressure saltwater additional onto land, posing a rising threat to freshwater-dependent agriculture like rice farming.
How do you implement nature-based options within the Mekong Delta, the place 2 % of the land stays untouched?
The urgency to avoid wasting the Mekong Delta has rallied worldwide businesses, growth banks, the Vietnamese authorities, native organizations, teachers, and farmers. The delta now attracts extra funding for environmental initiatives than another area in Southeast Asia. Crucially, there’s widespread consensus on what must be achieved: leveraging so-called nature-based options — NBS in conservation parlance — that use pure processes to advertise ecosystem well being.
“We should cease combating nature,” says Nguyen Huu Thien, a pure sources skilled and freelance guide based mostly in Can Tho.
Nature-based options are usually described as measures that shield, restore, or handle pure ecosystems. Examples of typical NBS initiatives are reforestation initiatives that restore degraded landscapes or the institution of protected areas to protect their pure circumstances.
However how do you implement nature-based options in a area just like the Mekong Delta, the place as little as 2 % of the land stays untouched; the place huge dikes have been constructed to reroute pure floodwaters; and the place your entire ecological system has been utterly altered for agricultural use?
Originating within the Tibetan highlands, the Mekong River traverses six nations earlier than splitting into two rivers under Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Each of those branches attain into Vietnam earlier than fanning out into the delta and the South China Sea. Colonial geographers within the 1800s described the delta as a harsh and malaria-infested place.
Within the Thirties, the French started constructing dikes and polders to guide recent water into areas the place rice might be grown, even within the dry season. Whereas rice can tolerate quick intervals of water shortage, it usually requires standing water for a good portion of its lifecycle, notably throughout crucial progress phases.
It was not till the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, nevertheless, that Vietnam, determined to develop its financial system by rice manufacturing, developed its huge community of irrigation canals. To assist the expansion of three rice crops a yr, giant ring-dike techniques have been established to each include recent water and shield cultivated areas from flooding.
This “rice first” coverage helped rescue the war-torn nation from hunger, remodeling it into a significant rice exporter. However the reengineering of the delta additionally led to drastic hydrological modifications. Whereas the tall dikes within the higher delta protected crops, they elevated water ranges downstream throughout peak flood intervals, culminating, in 2000, in a catastrophic flood that killed greater than 450 folks throughout the delta area.
Issues have been additionally compounding upstream, the place hydropower dams constructed on the primary stem of the Mekong River blocked the move of sediments that may in any other case be flushed downstream to feed farms alongside the best way and assist regenerate and rebuild the delta.
The Vietnamese authorities got here to grasp that its intensified rice-growing insurance policies have been harming the setting and limiting financial alternatives. It started advocating for an agricultural diversification coverage geared toward transitioning manufacturing from rice monoculture to a extra different farming strategy that included aquaculture, fruits, and horticulture. In 2017, legislators handed a regulation, often called Decision 120, reflecting the nation’s dedication to sustainably managing and conserving its pure sources.