| 英文摘要: | Asia's mega-deltas are densely populated and face multiple stressors including upstream development and sea-level rise. Adapting to these challenges requires difficult choices between hard and soft responses set within a strongly political context. The low-lying delta areas of southern Asia's major river basins exemplify the pressures of multiple, rapidly growing drivers of change acting on large, often highly vulnerable, populations. Management and planning in such complex situations involves difficult choices that are strongly politically influenced and can produce unequal outcomes for people's well-being. Management options are often characterized as hard (such as those including infrastructure and sea defences) and soft (for example, options that take into account land use and planning). Writing in Nature Climate Change, Alex Smajgl et al.1 evaluate a range of management options for the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, in response to a massive programme of upstream development and its impacts on downstream river and sediment flows, and the effects of increases in salinity due to rising sea levels. Smajgl et al. argue that a mix of hard and soft responses is economically and socially most beneficial but that options are politically contested and have important budgetary implications for key government ministries. Many studies of environmental change distinguish between the vulnerability of physical and social systems (what and who is vulnerable and why), often addressing one perspective more than the other. In contrast, Smajgl and colleagues1 consider both in the political context that underpins decision-making. Political concerns will always be critical to understanding decisions, particularly in situations where the stakes are high, as in the Mekong Delta, where hard options involve major investments and impose land-use requirements on hundreds of thousands of farmers.
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The Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
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Affiliations
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Declan Conway is at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
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