Environmental Criteria for Hydropower in the Mekong Region - WWF

The Current Status of Environmental Criteria for Hydropower Development in the Mekong Region: A litterature compilation
Coordinating bodies for water resources management at national level are becoming a
feature of new institutional structures, for example the National Water Resources
Council in Viet Nam and the National Water Resources Committee in Thailand. Some
are formal policy making bodies, like the Thai and Vietnamese apex bodies while
others have a less formal structure without policy making authority, such as in
Cambodia.
The challenge for water resource aspects related to hydropower development is to
achieve the active participation of energy ministries or parastatals which may perceive
such involvement as peripheral to their mandate. Hence more formalized regulatory
procedures for ensuring that hydropower planning processes are aligned with water
resources planning processes, and indeed policy, will be necessary. For example, in
Viet Nam, even though the Ministry of Industry is a member of the Council, the water
resources line agencies had little influence in the recent multi-year master planning
process for the National Hydropower Plan (NHP), coordinated by EVN. 14 A key
attribute of the NHP however was its focus on examining projects within the
boundaries of Viet Nam’s river basins and its use of basin modelling and multicriteria
screening techniques, although often the availability of data on aquatic
ecosystems was inadequate to derive accurate scenarios on potential impacts. The
priority projects emerging from the NHP are being used as a starting point for
subsequent basin water resource planning processes, and effectively constrain the
scope for substantial changes in the project’s parameters, thereby limiting the
effectiveness of the water resources planning process.
Similar constraints exist to the integration of sectoral interests across national and
provincial borders. The inventory of proposed hydropower projects in section 2.2.2
shows that much of the hydropower development in the region will be pursued under
either purely national or bilateral governance structures, led by either public sector
power entities, or the private sector. The extent to which water resources agencies
have an opportunity to influence the formative stages of project design is likely to be
very limited unless there are legislated requirements in respect of water resources, for
example maintaining minimum releases in the river system, requiring re-regulation of
peak flows or linking development plans to protected area strategies.
In recent years, PRC has begun to address the consequences of limited integration of
land use and water resources. This was succinctly summarized in the characterisation
by the Vice Minister of Water Resources, Suo Lisheng, in the terms “much water”
referring to frequent flooding, “little water” representing drought conditions affecting
300-400 cities and many rural areas, “dirty water” referring to serious pollution
problems, and “muddy water” referring to the consequences of soil erosion. 15 By
necessity, a more integrated approach to water resources management including
demand side management options is now being pursued, for example in the case of
watershed protection through the China Loess Plateau Project and in improving water
quality through the Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation Project. Such initiatives are taking
place in parallel with extensive new infrastructure development.
14 The National Hydropower Plan is awaiting approval of the Ministry of Industry.
15 See interview at http://www.adb.org/Water/Champions/lisheng.asp
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