Drought-Management Considerations for Climate-Change Adaptation

Focus on the Mekong Region: Viet Nam, Ninh Thuan province

Joint report from Oxfam GB in Viet Nam and Cambodia, and the International Environment and Disaster Management (IEDM) laboratory of Kyoto University

The Mekong plays an important role in ensuring the well-being of China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Viet Nam, as the major river supporting agriculture and many other economic activities in the region. It also brings regular floods to the region which, although sometimes damaging, are an integral part of the lives of many communities in the Mekong River basin. However, in recent times the river basin has become increasingly vulnerable to droughts. A notable example is the drought of 2004, which began a couple of years earlier and had grown into serious proportions by the year 2004. Dealing with drought requires a different strategy from that of dealing with the floods and typhoons that have been experienced in the Mekong region for many years. Local communities, governments, and NGOs are aware of how to deal with these age-old problems; but drought, being a slow-onset disaster with crippling impacts, needs to be viewed from a different perspective. This is a particular challenge in a region that has less experience of drought, and less local knowledge of how to deal with it. There could be catastrophic results unless efforts are made to know and understand what drought means to this flood-prone region.

This study is the result of a three-way collaboration between Oxfam GB in Viet Nam, the International Environment and Disaster Management (IEDM) laboratory of the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies (GSGES), Kyoto University, Japan, and the People's Committee of Ninh Thuan. It considers some aspects of the recent droughts in the Mekong region and tries to discover what could be the reasons behind them and how best they could be mitigated. The study has yielded valuable information about how communities perceive drought and climate change, and how local governments and NGOs could manage climatic disasters, particularly drought. It concludes that the drought impacts are in a real sense a reflection of developmental problems, and it provides policy options that could be implemented by communities, governments, and NGOs.

Download the full report PDF (1.20MB)

Date of publication: October 2007