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.
The paper “Strategic basin and delta planning increases the resilience of the Mekong Delta under future uncertainty”, recently published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 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.
Among the authors of the study, carried out by an international team of researchers, there are also Prof. Andrea Castelletti and Prof. Matteo Giuliani of Politecnico di Milano’s Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria.
The results of the study, briefly illustrated in a video from the Environmental Intelligence Lab, demonstrate 1) the need for integrated planning across basin and delta scales, 2) the role of river sediment management as a nature-based solution to increase delta resilience, and 3) global benefits from strategic basin management to maintain resilient deltas, especially under uncertain and changing conditions.