Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Understanding ‘water’
- Part II Water resources planning and management
- Part III Water resources planning and management: case studies
- III. 1 Water and waste water treatment
- III. 2 Agricultural water use
- III. 3 Urban water supply and management
- III. 4 Aquatic ecosystems
- III. 5 Industrial and mining water use
- III. 6 Rural and remote communities
- III. 7 Water infrastructure design and operation
- III. 8 Managing water across borders
- 31 Decision-making in the Murray–Darling Basin
- 32 Challenges to water cooperation in the lower Jordan River Basin
- 33 Adaptation and change in Yellow River management
- 34 Managing international river basins: successes and failures of the Mekong River Commission
- III. 9 Market mechanisms in water management
- Contributors
- Index
- References
34 - Managing international river basins: successes and failures of the Mekong River Commission
from III. 8 - Managing water across borders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Understanding ‘water’
- Part II Water resources planning and management
- Part III Water resources planning and management: case studies
- III. 1 Water and waste water treatment
- III. 2 Agricultural water use
- III. 3 Urban water supply and management
- III. 4 Aquatic ecosystems
- III. 5 Industrial and mining water use
- III. 6 Rural and remote communities
- III. 7 Water infrastructure design and operation
- III. 8 Managing water across borders
- 31 Decision-making in the Murray–Darling Basin
- 32 Challenges to water cooperation in the lower Jordan River Basin
- 33 Adaptation and change in Yellow River management
- 34 Managing international river basins: successes and failures of the Mekong River Commission
- III. 9 Market mechanisms in water management
- Contributors
- Index
- References
Summary
Significance of the Mekong River
The Mekong River is, by many criteria, the most important river in South-east Asia. It is large, it is politically significant, it has great conservation importance, and it supports a large and rapidly growing human population. In addition the river is coming under increasing pressure from development, leading many authors to identify it as a river ‘at the crossroads’ (Kummu et al., 2008), ‘at risk’ (Osborne, 2004), or ‘under threat’ (Osborne, 2009).
The Mekong is the largest river in South-east Asia, and, by many measures, in the world's top dozen. It has a mean annual discharge estimated at 475 × 109 m3 (Adamson et al., 2009), making it about the tenth largest river by discharge, and has a catchment area of 795 000 km2 supporting about 70 million people (Campbell, 2009a). The river is in many respects a fairly typical tropical flood-pulse river, but is unusually regular in the timing and size of the annual flood. At Pakse in southern Laos, the peak of the flood most commonly arrives on 1 September, with a standard deviation of 23 days (Campbell, 2009b). At Pakse from 1993–2002, the size of the mean annual peak flow was 24 times the mean annual minimum flow, the index of variation of the peak flow was 0.08, and the coefficient of variation of the annual flow was 0.18, which is very small for a river of its size (McMahon et al., 1992).
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- Water Resources Planning and Management , pp. 724 - 740Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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