Like most regions, ASEAN countries face more extreme weather patterns, so riverbased systems must cope to ensure people are safe and thriving, alongside productive landscapes.
Our Partnership for the Environmental Management of Seas of South East Asia (PEMSEA) supports PEMSEA to develop solutions in Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM) – similar to Integrated Catchment or Watershed Management globally – actively within six ASEAN countries among 11 country partners.
Each country has unique challenges.
However, as with other IRBM programmes, PEMSEA takes a holistic and integrated ‘Source to Sea’ approach to assessing and framing solutions that fit best with each catchment and the environmental pressures and socio-economic conditions that exist.
“PEMSEA challenges differ from New Zealand’s integrated catchment management context, with significant population pressure adding to municipal waste issues and drinking water supply scarcity,” explains Sustainability Advisor – Landscape Solutions, Ross Abercrombie. “These are priorities, but the solutions are also reliant on nature-based approaches to secure and retain fresh drinking water and build ecosystem buffers that cope with floods or typhoons.
“Like most regions, ASEAN countries face more extreme weather patterns, so riverbased systems must cope to ensure people are safe and thriving, alongside productive landscapes.”
PEMSEA IRBM is funded by the UNDP and the Global Environment Facility alongside others. IRBM work to date has included working agreements and developing background State of River Basin (SORB) reports, providing baseline data and analysis of pressures and contexts within each of the seven selected priority river basins.
EnviroStrat now works on a generic solutions template that can be applied to frame mitigations within each river basin, and underpin future case development with one solution per river basin.
Nature-based solutions include land use studies to assess re-afforestation of hill country and re-establishing widespread mangrove forests in river deltas. Each in conjunction with local context and agencies, and tailored to meet local pressure and demand, where possible we identify funding opportunities for future business case development to fund solutions.
We are grateful to our partners at PEMSEA and Governments within the IRBM programme, along with funders and supporters.