Mekong Delta To Sink Below Sea Level By 2050

The Mekong Delta is under threat.

Photo Insert: The Mekong Delta is sinking at an average of about 1.1 centimeters per year, due to excessive groundwater extraction, sand mining, and reduced sediment deposition.

The land is sinking, eroding, and losing nutrients. So farmer Ho Van Hong's family diversified into fruit, ditching the rice monoculture to cope with depleted soil and other seepages of seawater in Vietnam, a fertile country whose exports feed people in more than 100 nations, Lien Hoang reported for Nikkei Asia.

It is sinking at an average of about 1.1 centimeters per year, due to excessive groundwater extraction, sand mining, and reduced sediment deposition. It is projected to sink into the sea by 2050.

This very threat to the Mekong Delta's existence is compounded by sea level rise. Writing for Sustainability Times on January 14, 2022, Daniel T. Cross reported that while Mekong Delta is sinking fast, it can still be saved.

Home to 17 million people, it produces half of Vietnam’s annual rice output and much of its freshwater fish. Vast swathes of its land have been distributed to agriculture and aquaculture.

Two scientists from the Wageningen University & Research and Utrecht University in the Netherlands have concluded that such a tragic fate would come if nothing is done to stop subsidence and sea level rise that has already caused high salinity in the delta.

The delta is only around a meter above sea level on average, but large areas in it are sinking. Frances Dunn, a researcher at Utrecht University and one of the authors of a new study said it will sink faster.

“The delta sinks as a natural process, but in recent years land subsidence has been drastically accelerated by humans due to unsustainable groundwater extraction,” explains Philip Minderhoud, an assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research who was the paper’s other author.

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