Fisherman Tran Van Hua sat in his sampan on the great lagoon at the mouth of Vietnam’s Huong River, praying for fish. “The catches keep getting smaller,” he said ruefully. “There are fewer fish, shrimp and crabs. We don’t know why.”
Nearby, fish farmer Phan Tan Dung offered some explanation. Several years ago he bought three fish ponds from the government, which was promoting aquaculture on the lagoon. Now there are too many fish farms, he said. Pollutants cannot flow out because of overcrowding and disease spreads from pond to pond and from pond to lagoon. All along the lagoon’s edges, fish farmers stand scooping off mounds of algae blooming atop the still, fetid water.
The Huong River occupies a unique place in Vietnam’s identity. Just upstream is the city of Hue, a World Heritage City and home of Vietnam’s former imperial Nguyen dynasty, and the Huong is immortalized in Vietnamese classical poetry and literature. “The Huong River is very special for Hue, its people and for the people of Vietnam,” said Nguyen Ngoc Thien, vice chairman the Hue Provincial People’s Committee. But competing uses have created myriad conflicts, conflicts that government officials are now turning to environmental flows to resolve. “When we heard about the environmental flows approach we thought this would be a very useful tool in supporting and assisting in the management of our river,” Thien said.
Working with the IUCN and the International Water Management Institute, local government officials conducted a rapid environmental flows assessment of the Huong between 2003 and 2004. Funds are now being raised to conduct a more comprehensive assessment as part of a larger management plan for the Huong. More broadly, however, the rapid assessment was designed as a pilot project to introduce the principles of environmental flows to Vietnam in the hope that “e-flows” might be used to help improve management of the more than 2,000 rivers in the fast-growing country.
“Vietnam is in a transition period. It’s not really a centrally planned economy anymore,” said Nguyen Le Tuan, Head of the Policy and Planning Division of the Department of Water Resources Management in Hanoi. “The planning process, especially economic planning, has many stakeholders now. So river basins also have to change.”
While water resource management is typically a top-down, government-led process, e-flows brings together various stakeholders to determine an equitable way to share the river and leave enough to support the river’s ecosystem. The e-flows concept is now being introduced to East Asia through the IUCN’s book “Flow.” The IUCN has been working with officials in Vietnam and other countries in the Mekong Region to translate “Flow” into local languages, in the process building familiarity with the concepts among government officials, civil society and academe. “The biggest achievement in terms of using the “Flow” book is to actually initiate a discussion of the linkages between hydrology, ecology, economy and society,” said Maria Osbeck, a senior program officer at IUCN in Bangkok.
The time is right for applying e-flows to Asia, Osbeck said. “The emphasis on economic development is overriding everything else,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is ensure that within this development trend there is also recognition of how that can impact the environment upon which much of the economy still directly depends”
In the Songkhram River basin of northeastern Thailand, the process has moved even farther. An e-flows assessment has already been carried out followed by a scenario workshop and multi-stakeholder Dialogue resulting in improved understanding of the role of tributaries in the Code was seen as a short cut that contained all the benefits of agreement with none of the formal red tape.”
PAGEV brokered the role, but moved up the chain of command. More people at high levels got involved, including the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, as the process went on. And the national stakeholders, based on PAGEV pilots, brought their influence to bear.
All six nations have signed on. Now if just four ratify it, the Code goes into effect.
Written by Wayne Arnold
