The MRC’s vision is for “a world class, financially secure international river basin organisation serving the Mekong countries to achieve the basin vision”. Its mission is “to promote and coordinate sustainable management and development of water and related resources for the countries’ mutual benefit and the people’s well-being”.
The key words and phrases to consider in these statements are coordination, mutual benefit, people’s well being, and sustainable development. In my introductory speech here at the MRC Secretariat in April, I noted the importance of the river to the social, economic and cultural development of the region. I also recognised that we need to look below the water’s surface to appreciate the full value of this resource.
Since then, I have had more time to get to know the organisation and its programmes. Listening to some of the criticism of the MRC over the past years, it sometimes appears that people are suggesting there are two Mekong Rivers:
One is the river we see flowing outside the MRC Secretariat building, a river that is subject to rapid development pressures from a range of sources: from private sector hydropower (driven by expected flow changes in the mainstream, high oil prices and concerns over climate change), from changes to watersheds (caused by mining, plantations, and continued shifting cultivation practices), from increasing pollution loads created by rapidly increasing urban development and agriculture, and shortly, from significant changes in flow rates and timing and sediment transport as a result of dams being built in China.
The other river would be the one that we model and discuss within MRC programmes. The question is, to what extent does this one represent reality? In the same way that we can calibrate our numerical models to ensure that predictions for flood events or sedimentation patterns are representative, perhaps we should also calibrate the approach used by our other programmes to gauge the extent to which they are consistent with national planning systems. Then we could see whether there is a link in place that takes the results of our work to the desks of people making decisions and also whether the integrated water resource management concepts that we readily punctuate in all our reports are really those that are directing investments?
If the correlation is weak, then indeed we would have to accept the criticism that has been targeted at us. It could perhaps be said that in the past there was not always good correlation between MRC programmes and national planning systems, but it should be remembered that we have spent much of that time building the necessary foundations for future mutual understanding, models and procedures.
This is not something that happened in the US, Australia
or Europe overnight. We learnt from our recent visit to
the Columbia Basin that in some places billions of dollars
have been - and continue to be - spent on rectifying the
impacts of dam construction. We have a chance to get it
right first time, and we are working towards that goal.
I will refer to just some of the items we are now fast tracking
across our programmes – this is a start and there
will be more. We will, however, need a far larger flexible
fund to deal with these if we are to avoid compromising
our ongoing important activities, and here the Water Management
Trust Fund can play a significant role in allowing us to
react quickly and effectively.
Two years ago, no one foresaw this level of development
on the mainstream. There was rather some impression that
the status quo would continue. Let me read you a
couple of extracts from relevant reports:
Firstly,
“Mainstream dams or weirs in the mid and lower
Mekong are therefore most unlikely to be part of any balanced
development scenario that complies with the objectives of
the 1995 Agreement
This comes from a World Bank-supported Mekong Water Resources
Assistance Strategy report in November 2004, and is the
conclusion based on study of the potential impacts on fisheries.
Going back further in time,
“Data from all reaches are insufficient to describe
important fish stocks and migrating patterns, locations,
and characters of spawning and rearing habitats:
The projects cannot be safely designed or mitigated without
first establishing a sound and reliable database”.
This was not taken from an NGO report, nor from a Fisheries
Programme paper, but rather from a technical study undertaken
for the Mekong Secretariat on run-of-river mainstream dams
in 1994.
Unfortunately the necessary studies to fill these information gaps were not initiated. We now need to move forward quickly to make up for lost time. The challenge is to see what can be done with the available knowledge to take a more integrated perspective. I will return to those actions we have taken in a short while. For the minute though, I would like to come back to the four R’s that I referred to in my inaugural remarks at the MRC Secretariat.
First the Regional Dimension
There is no question that the gradual underlying changes in the basin caused by growth, expansion, and individual project proposals have regional dimensions and impacts.
Secondly, let us consider the Relevance of the organisation:
Thirdly there is the Risk Reduction function of the MRC:
Fourthly comes Responsibility.
When judging the record of the MRC, we need to look at what has been achieved so far. Yes, these achievements have taken a long time, but that is normal in the field of international resource management. Our successes include:
We are also confronted with new challenges, including climate change, agriculture and food security, the ‘fifth R’ – Riparianisation and how to recruit well qualified staff whole overcoming any perceptions of bias, location (which is hopefully a short term question), and the greater involvement and ownership of line agencies, so that our work in better linked to national systems
Meeting these challenges will require interaction and coordination – working across sectoral divides. The emerging MRC Hydropower Programme provides an example of how this can be achieved, and how issues can be focused, as does the second phase of the Basin Development Plan. In fact, across all our work there is already a push to meet the challenge posed by the mainstream hydropower developments.
In line with our Strategic Plan 2006-2010, the Basin Development Plan is fast-tracking studies on flows and sediments to look at the cumulative impacts of mainstream development.
The Hydropower Programme is facilitating dialogue through various approaches, including holding a multi-stakeholder consultation in September, convening expert group analysis on the ‘barrier effect’, and conducting a strategic environmental assessment of the proposed mainstream projects.
The Fisheries Programme is conducting an ichthyoplankton survey, modelling the cascade effect of the dam projects to estimate fish survival rates, reviewing mitigation experiences elsewhere in the world, carrying out baseline surveys and assessing the potential for future reservoir fisheries. The Environment and Navigation Programmes are contributing by working on guidelines for sustainability assessment and standard specifications for lock designs respectively. In general, across the MRC we are networking with the Lao government through forthcoming discussions with the Department of Electricity, engaging with the M-Power Network of stakeholders, approaching our dialogue partners, China and Myanmar, trying to bring the private sector and financiers into discussions through the International Hydropower Association, and talking to the media openly about what is going on.
More broadly, let us now look at what the measures of success will be when I hand over to my successor in three years time. What will she or he comment on in the welcoming remarks on the occasion of Mekong Day 2011? I hope that the next Chief Executive Officer will be able to recognise that the MRC:
To achieve these goals we will have to strengthen existing partnerships and open new ones. This is not a question of defending our turf, but of reaping the mutual benefits of collaborative working relationships. Any success can be measured against the 4R’s:
I would like to finish by returning to the question of the two rivers – what does the calibration look like? If the river we are talking about in our governance meetings and represented in our work programmes closely mirrors what is happening in the real world, then we can be happy that we have done our job.
Thank you