Managing international river basins: successes and failures of the Mekong River Commission

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511974304.037

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

Ian C. Campbell

Edited by

R. Quentin Grafton and

Karen Hussey

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Ian C. Campbell: Affiliation:
Monash University
R. Quentin Grafton: Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra
Karen Hussey: Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra

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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).

Type: Chapter
Information: Water Resources Planning and Management , pp. 724 - 740

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511974304.037 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

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