Will climate change spell the end of coal and hydropower in the Mekong?
This year has been rough for the 70 million people who call the Mekong River basin home: a severe drought rocked the region for months before yielding to deadly flooding.
The Mekong slowed to its lowest level in recorded history, knocking the world’s largest freshwater fishery—Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake—out of balance. The drought hurt the region’s fishing and farming communities, threatening its food supply. When the rain came, flooding reportedly displaced at least 100,000 people in Laos alone.
Mainland Southeast Asia is among the most vulnerable regions in the world to the impacts of climate change: according to one Global Climate Risk Index, Myanmar and Vietnam are in the top 10 most vulnerable countries. Cambodia and Thailand are in the top 20.
Despite its vulnerabilities, the governments of the lower Mekong are still pushing development plans centred on unsustainable hydropower dams and coal. Dams across the Mekong basin and coal power plants will ostensibly provide much-needed electricity and income, but the impacts of climate change on water resources are throwing all of this into question.
Skylar Lindsay
