A strategic approach to increase the resilience of river deltas

eiLab contributed to a recent publication on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), which demonstrates an approach to identify planning levers that can increase the resilience of river deltas under a wide range of future conditions for the Mekong Delta.

Globally, river deltas, which support some of the planet’s most productive agroeconomic systems and half a billion livelihoods, are at risk of being drowned by rising sea levels and accelerated subsidence. Whether delta land falls below sea level will depend on land and water management in the delta, sediment supply from the upstream basin, and global climate change. Those drivers cover multiple scales and domains and are rapidly changing, uncertain, and interconnected, which makes finding robust strategies to increase the resilience of river deltas challenging. Read more HERE.

Schmitt, R.J.P., M. Giuliani, S. Bizzi, G.M. Kondolf, G.C. Daily, and A. Castelletti (2021), Strategic basin and delta planning increases the resilience of the Mekong Delta under future uncertainty, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (36), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026127118