Vietnamplus

The Agriculture and Cooperatives Ministry of Thailand is planning to build 421 more water storage facilities in the fight against a looming water shortage.

A conference was held in Ben Tre province on January 3 to discuss measures for coping with drought and saltwater intrusion which are getting more serious in the Mekong Delta this dry season.

The national irrigation department has reported a staggeringly low level of water reserves in northern and central regions, signalling the threat of a severe drought in 2020.

Thai authorities have urged 31 out of 77 provinces and administrative areas nationwide to brace for severe drought in 2020.

Many reservoirs in the south-central province of Ninh Thuan are facing a shortage of water, affecting supply for the 2019-2020 winter-spring crop, animals and household use.

Saltwater has intruded early this year into the Mekong Delta’s coastal provinces, affecting the availability of freshwater for irrigation and household use.

The Mekong Delta may experience sooner and even more serious droughts and saltwater intrusion in the 2019 – 2020 dry season, compared to the situation in 2016 when historic saline intrusion was recorded, an official has said.

Authorities in provinces in the Mekong Delta and Can Tho city are dredging irrigation works and storing fresh water to cope with saltwater intrusion during the dry season.

More than 10,000 residents in the Song Van Dong Van Karst Plateau in the northern mountainous province of Ha Giang will no longer have to worry about water shortage for their daily life thanks to the launch of a pumping station on November 16.

The Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, an area that helps feed about 200 million people, is predicted to sink underwater by 2100.

Thailand’s Office of National Water Resources (ONWR) on October 22 urged people in some localities to brace up for water shortage that could last for eight months as the dry season is expected to begin on November 1.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has warned that northern localities are facing water shortages as reservoirs are drying up.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has instructed competent agencies to promptly create regional coordination institutions and a sustainable development mechanism in the Mekong Delta.

The Thai Cabinet on August 27 approved a 15.8 billion baht budget to resolve drought and flooding issues in 76 provinces, government spokesperson Narumon Pinyosinwat announced.

Although locals in the central city of Da Nang are now having water supply in a rotary fashion, they still face the risk of a relapse of water shortage as the salinity in input water for Cau Do waterwork – one of the major water plants of the city – has increased sharply.

The forest fire task force of Indonesia’s Riau province has deployed four helicopters to douse the forest fires raging across the southern part of the province on Sumatra Island.

The water level in the Mekong River in Thailand’s northeastern province of Nakhon Phanom is rising by about 60-70cm per day.

Vietnam was excluded in the list of 17 countries facing the risk of extremely high water stress, according to the Washington D.C.-based World Resources Institute (WRI)’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas.

Prolonged droughts have made adverse impacts on the lives of people in the central region of Vietnam.

If extreme heat continues in the central region until the end of the dry season, about 65,500ha of rice and annual crops will suffer from drought and water scarcity, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).