China's Mekong River dams held back large amounts of water during a damaging drought in downstream countries last year despite China having higher-than-average water levels upstream, a U.S. research company said in a study.
BANGKOK - China’s Mekong River dams held back large amounts of water during a damaging drought in downstream countries last year despite China having higher-than-average water levels upstream, a U.S. research company said in a study.
The findings by Eyes on Earth Inc., a research and consulting company specialising in water, published in a U.S.-government funded study, could complicate tricky discussions between China and other Mekong countries on how to manage the river that supports 60 million people as it flows past Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and through Cambodia and Vietnam.
Instead, satellite measurements of “surface wetness” in China’s Yunnan province, through which the Upper Mekong flows, suggest the region in 2019 actually had slightly above-average combined rainfall and snowmelt during the May to October wet season. China - which has no formal water treaties with the lower Mekong countries - promised to cooperate on management of the river and also to investigate the causes of last year’s record drought.
It then compared that data with river-level readings by the Mekong River Commission at Thailand’s Chiang Saen Hydrological Station, the closest station to China, to create a predictive model of “natural” levels for the river given a certain amount of upstream rainfall and snowmelt.
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