rivers
The Mekong River is one of the greatest river systems on Earth. It is ranked as the twelfth-longest river in the world and eighth in terms of annual discharge. The seasonal variation in the water level and the range of wetland habitats inundated by the Mekong River provide the source of the river system’s productivity. The rich biodiversity within the Mekong River basin, especially...
As water resources become increasingly scarce in Africa, the need for the use of economics to aid in decision-making and management becomes apparent. Global experience shows that economic approaches may achieve the best results. Water is the basis of the economy as well as essential for human life and biodiversity. The Pangani River Basin in north-eastern Tanzania provides a good starting...
In 2009, the Vietnam government initiated a policy to conserve soil, water, natural landscapes and biodiversity in the Dong Nai River System. The Prime Minister of Vietnam issued a Decision 380 dated 10 April 2009 on the policy for payments for forest environmental services. During the pilot in Lam Dong province, a fee has been imposed of 20 VND/KWh and 40 VND/m3 of water...
The Mekong River produces more than two per cent of the world’s entire fish catch – around 2.5 million tons. In numbers of fish species, it is second only to the Amazon. New book written by SEI's Delia Paul shows the Mekong fishery beyond the usual postcard view.
The concept of resilience is widely promoted as a promising notion to guide new approaches to ecosystem and resource management that try to enhance a system's capacity to cope with change. A variety of mechanisms of resilience specific for different systems have been proposed. In the context of resource management those include but are not limited to the diversity of response options and...
Global sources of change offer unprecedented challenges to conventional river management strategies, which no longer appear capable of credibly addressing a trap: the failure of conventional river defense engineering to manage rising trends of disordering extreme events, including frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, and water stagnation in the Hungarian reaches of the Tisza River...
Climatic hazards such as floods and droughts have always been a primary matter of concern for human populations. Severe floods damage settlements, transport networks, and arable land. Although devastating droughts are harmful primarily for agriculture and terrestrial ecosystems, they can also lead to local water supply shortages. Despite significant achievements in science and technology and...
River basin management is faced with complex problems that are characterised by uncertainty and change. In transboundary river basins, historical, legal, and cultural differences add to the complexity. The literature on adaptive management gives several suggestions for handling this complexity. It recognises the importance of management regimes as enabling or limiting adaptive management, but...
Water quality describes the physicochemical characteristics of the water body. These vary naturally with the weather and with the spatiotemporal variation of the water flow, i.e., the flow regime. Worldwide, biota have adapted to the variation in these variables. River channels and their riparian zones contain a rich selection of adapted species and have been able to offer goods and services...
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