Building Resilience to Saline Intrusion in the Mekong Delta

Project Description

Building Resilience to Saline Intrusion in the Mekong Delta

Client: The World Bank | Duration: May 2021-March 2022 | Location: Vietnam

The rural communities of the Mekong Delta region inhabit Vietnam’s largest and most productive agricultural area. The region’s enormous agriculture productivity is highly dependent on the delta’s abundance of fresh water in the wet season. However, during the dry season accessing clean water for domestic purposes has always been challenging because when the Mekong is in low flow, some seawater tends to flow naturally into the river.

In recent years this natural inflow of seawater has been reaching further into the river and the groundwater beneath it, and staying longer due to a number of influences. These include increased demand for water for dry season agriculture, hydropower, sand mining and land subsidence. Looking into the future, there are concerns that climate change will make the situation even worse.

The initiative Building Resilience to Saline Intrusion in the Mekong Delta aims to assess the current status of the rural domestic water supply sector, analyze impacts of saline intrusion and other climate-related hazards, develop tools to integrate climate adaptation and mitigation factors into sector development and recommend interventions to strengthen resilience in the sector.

The results will inform the design and implementation of infrastructure and non-infrastructure investments and build adaptive capacity of domestic water supply in the Vietnam Mekong Delta.

Specific activities:

Conducting a Delta Wide Situation analysis of water supply capacity vs. demands, water source availability vs. water quality, existing water management systems, hazard mapping and hazard projection against climate change scenarios for the period 2030 – 2050.
Undertaking Vulnerability Assessments of domestic water supply systems at the delta-wide level and in two selected case study locations. These will cover sea level rise and six climate-related hazards: saline intrusion, flood, drought, erosion, land subsidence and water pollution.
Recommending structural and non-structural interventions to safeguard and improve the resilience of domestic water supply systems, in consideration of local conditions and hazards.
Providing recommendations to develop tools including Source Assessment Methodology, Climate Resilience Framework for Domestic Water Supply, and Sustainable and Climate Resilience Water Safety Plan.