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Experts Emphasize Working with Nature to Save Asia's 'Disappearing Deltas'

Zsombor Peter

   BANGKOK - Water and climate experts from across Asia are stressing the
   need to work with nature, rather than against it, to save the
   continent's "disappearing deltas," home to some 400 million people.

   Mounting research blames a confluence of rising sea levels driven by
   global warming and the damming and dredging of key rivers and their
   tributaries for the rapid sinking and shrinking of Asia's seven major
   delta systems, from the Indus in Pakistan to the Pearl in China.

   The experts say swelling cities are adding to the pressure by weighing
   down the deltas and sucking up groundwater. The seven deltas alone host
   14 of the world's 33 megacities, including Bangkok, where the experts
   are gathered this week, parts of which are sinking by 2 centimeters a
   year.

   Losing the deltas will not only erase some of the world's most diverse
   ecosystems, experts add, but drive mass migration, deplete vital
   farmland and disrupt some of Asia's most dynamic business hubs.

   The Pearl River Delta, which empties into the South China Sea past Hong
   Kong, has been dubbed the "world's workshop" for its abundance of busy
   factories. In Vietnam, forecasters say 1 million people will have to
   leave the Mekong River Delta, the country's rice bowl, by 2050.

   "These are some of the most vulnerable places to climate change and
   change across river systems, but they are also the home for a number of
   us who live here, they are also the breadbasket of the world that feeds
   a number of the countries that depend on them," said Kavita
   Prakash-Mani, global conservation director for the World Wide Fund for
   Nature (WWF).

   "So while we are worried about numerous ecosystems around the world, we
   really need to be putting special attention on our delta systems and
   the wetlands and all the other ecosystems they support," she added.

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